Beginning Ruby: From Novice to Professional (Beginning from Novice to Professional)

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Beginning Ruby is easily one of the most readable and clearest technical texts I have encountered in a while. I am not a professional programmer just an experienced web designer. That means that I've been exposed to some programming in the form of Perl, PHP and JavaScript but don't really know them. At the urging of a knowledgeable friend I've decided to learn to program with Ruby.

I've tried the online version of the Pickaxe book to start learning the process and found that it makes too many assumptions about programming skill for me. Not so Beginning Ruby. It is well written and assumes little programming background, not zero background but little. Perfect.

Peter Cooper has managed to introduce topics in a logical and non-intimidating manner. Explanations are clear. The writing is conversational but neither wordy or pandering. After working through about a third of the book I am feeling positive about gaining a practical working knowledge of Ruby. I don't think it actually will bring me to a truly professional level. That will take years of practice and study.

The first half or so of the book covers Ruby at the command line and text file levels. The focus of the second half moves towards using Ruby on the web. Ruby on Rails gets a more than cursory section and using Ruby without Rails in CGI is covered too, as is working with HTTP and other internet but not directly web content programming topics.

Absent is coverage of any kind of GUI programming for Ruby. That's okay because making regular installed programs not my interest. Though with OS X now offering Ruby integration with its programming environment I may eventually want to learn more.

But no one book can cover everything. If you are comfortable with hand editing code or using the command line then you should find Beginning Ruby a friendly text, part tutorial, part reference and at the introductory to intermediate levels excellent. I can't speak for the pros. Look for their reviews.

This is an excellent book for anyone getting started with Ruby, or who has been using Rails for a little while and feels they need stronger Ruby skills (which, I suspect, describes a great number of Rails programmers, myself included).

Despite its title, this is not just a beginner's book. It does start at the beginning, and it is written without assuming a lot of background, but it is not a simplified, dumbed-down treatment. I found it to be very easy to read, and it follows a natural progression from language basics through a variety of advanced topics.

The author is a very experienced Ruby programmer, and his insights shine throughout the book. (Among many other things, he's the creator of Feed Digest, Ruby Inside, and code snippets, which he sold to DZone.

In addition to an exposition of the language that builds nicely over the course of the book, there's chapters on the Ruby ecosystem, how to design an application, and network programming. There's also a chapter that covers many of the useful libraries and gems.

There is one chapter that summarizes Rails, but this is definitely a Ruby book, not a Rails book.

Any Ruby book will inevitably be compared to Dave Thomas' Programming Ruby (commonly known as "the Pickaxe" for the image on its cover), which has been the standard reference for the language since its debut and won't lose its spot as a reference work. I found Beginning Ruby to be easier to absorb, however, and I thought the examples were especially clear and useful. If you're already deep into Ruby, you probably don't need this book. But if you're relatively early in the learning curve, I highly recommend it.

When I was learning Ruby what I really wanted was a well-structured book that began with the assumption that I already knew how to program and then guided me quickly through the special features of Ruby. At the time such a book did not exist. Now, with the publication of Peter Cooper's "Beginning Ruby", it does.

The book is well written, nicely laid out, the explanations are clear and the code examples are useful. In short, if you already have some programming experience and want an accessible introduction to the world of Ruby, this is the book to get.

I have been a professional programmer for nearly twenty years and I have learned and used many programming languages along the way. My normal process for learning a new language is to do a lot of online research regarding the books that are available and buy several of the books that are consistently praised my most folks.

Ruby posed some difficulties in this area because, until recently, there have not been very many Ruby books available in English. I purchased several books, and while I will not say that any of them were bad, I will say that until I got my hands on "Beginning Ruby", I was not making very good progress in learning the language.

All of the other Ruby books that I have tried to use for learning followed that same very tired pattern. The first several chapters of the book cover various aspects of the language in-depth. There would be a chapter about variables, a chapter about flow control, a chapter about classes and objects, etc. Each chapter covers the subject in detail. That's fine for a language reference, but not a very effecting way to teach someone a new programming language.

Mr. Cooper's approach is one that I would like to see other authors of programming tutorials adopt. After the obligatory chapters on getting Ruby installed on your system, and giving a "whistle-stop" overview of the language, he begins to cover surprising number of topics in the third chapter. Rather than cover each facet of the language in-depth, he covers many, many facets of the language, even some more advanced concepts like symbols and blocks, but only superficially. The result is that by the time you hit chapter four, you are ready to start writing a "real" application that uses many of the features you were just introduced to.

The book has a nice, conversational style. When a topic is introduced, the author reassures the reader that it will be covered in more depth later in the book. There are also several points where the author stops the reader and says something like "don't read on until this makes sense."

This book belongs in the hands of anyone and everyone who is serious about learning the Ruby programming language.

This is a wonderful book. I snapped up the eBook version from Apress the day it was released. With Ruby, you will eventually own a copy of the 'pickaxe' book. The pickaxe is to Ruby as K&R is to C and as the Camel book is to Perl. Indispensible and important, but not appropriate for the amateur or absolute beginner.

P.Cooper's book is here for you with good examples and a nice flow from basics to more challenging things, he doesn't leave you scratching your head.

This book does assume some prior programming knowledge or experience, but not a lot. If you are an absolute beginner with ZERO knowledge of programming, head for the book by Chris Pine...

If you're curious about Ruby or Rails, this may be the place to start.

This is an excellent. I started out reading another book, "Programming Ruby" also known as the Pickaxe Book. Although the Pickaxe book is an excellent reference guide, it covers too much for a beginner programmer to comprehend.

The Pickaxe book regularly uses examples of code that have not been defined, confusing the reader. Not so with "Beginning Ruby". The Author, Peter Cooper, writes in a very condensed and chronological manner. Simple concepts are explained and then built upon. It's as if Peter Cooper cuts the steak up into small pieces so it all goes down. With the Pickaxe book, the author is trying to swallow the steak down in one huge gulp.

I would highly recommend this book for anyone that wants to learn Ruby. I would also recommend purchasing the Pickaxe book to be used as a reference guide to all the features available in Ruby.

This book is a reasonable introduction to Ruby for novice to intermediate programmers. I do not recommend it highly for professional programmers with extensive experience. For advanced programmers unfamiliar with Ruby hoping to implement a large project with a short learning period, the book, while quite broad in its coverage, is far too shallow in its handling of any specific topic. Given the name "Beginning Ruby", this is reasonable. However, given the subtitle "From Novice to Professional", my assessment is that it learns too far to the novice side of that range.

An excellent professor that I had the pleasure to study under once hypothesized that a programming book's value is usually inversely proportional to its length. This book tends to support that hypothesis. Its descriptions are overly wordy at the expense of completeness.

If you are a novice programmer, buy this book. If you are a professional, have your employer buy this book for you, get it for free, and place it on your bookshelf just to let everyone know you're a Ruby programmer.

I have zero programming experience (unless you count html) and I have attempted to get into programming before, but most books frustrated me. This book is very thorough and it gives you clear explanations for everything. It could be that Ruby is easier to learn than other languages (that's what I've been told), but if you are truly a novice you will be able to get through this book pretty easily and you will have a good foundation of the language.

I'm happy with this book overall and I think it presents a lot of good information. The writing is clear and concise and it presents topics in an easy to understand manner. So far, I've come across a few minor issues that slipped past the error-checkers. I would recommend this book to beginning programmers looking to pick up Ruby. It's a very light read for experienced developers who may wish for something more substantial.

Page 40: "Chaining together multiple comparisons is also possible with a clever use of parenthesis:

puts "You're a working age man" if gender == "male" && (age >= 18 && age <= 65)

This is a useless example because the parenthesis do not change the outcome of the logic at all - they are unnecessary. A useful example would be more along the lines of: some_check || (another_check && related_check)

Page 59: Arrays are described as stacks with push and pop operations, but it states that they are FIFO which is incorrect, they are LIFO.

I think Beginning Ruby: From Novice to Professional is a better first Ruby book than the venerable Pickaxe (a.k.a. Programing Ruby). The previous statement is almost heresy in the Ruby community. Don't get me wrong, you should own the Pickaxe. It's a great book and certainly lives up to it's description as "the definitive reference to Ruby". That said, it's very big, and is much more of a reference than an introduction.

Beginning Ruby is an excellent (and I would argue more approachable) introduction to the Ruby language, written by one of it's more notable users. Weighing in at over 600 pages, this is a comprehensive book. At the same time, it's quite a bit smaller than the Pickaxe, which makes it much more portable (there's also a PDF version available for $10 if you've purchased the dead-tree edition, for the ultimate in portability).

This book covers everything you need to know to be productive in Ruby. It covers the built in functionality of Ruby well, in addition to covering a lot of the libraries that you will need to do more advanced things. Peter's writing style is concise, but not dry. As a result, the book is very readable.

In summary, if you want to learn Ruby, this is the book to buy.

A new addition to the "Beginning..." series of books from Apress this one follows the highly successful layout of the other books. It starts with how to install Ruby on various operating systems including Windows, OS X, and Linux. Then the reader gets a good introduction to the basics of Ruby including writing your first few lines of programing. For those who need it the author takes the time to introduces the reader to the concepts of class and object as they related to the object oriented programming environment. From there the reader moves into the basics of programming with Ruby, including variables working with integers, characters and strings interpolation working with an array flow control and regular expressions.

The book then walks the reader through building a text analyzer program. Of course you to know more to create more complex programs and the author delivers a more advanced discussion of classes objects and modules. And no program is complete without documentation, built in error handling and testing. The author goes over these and other items in detail. Finally, in Chapter 12, you develop a much larger Ruby application by writing a bot program. The book ends with a discussion of Ruby on rails.

The book contains several excellent appendices and is filled with code examples. Beginning Ruby is highly recommend to anybody interested in this programming language and provides sufficient information to write basic programs without any difficulty.

If you are a Ruby newbie like myself developing a RoR application, read this book *before* you dive into Rails-specific titles like Agile Web Development with Rails, 2nd Edition. It will make your life far easier. The overview of OOP alone is worth the price of the book.

Ruby is my first programming language (I'm coming from a designer/html/css world); and this is the first book I've come across that is talking to me. I've made leaps and bounds with it.

I am not in the habit of reviewing books that I have not finished reading, but like the clinical trial that is stopped because it is obvious that patients taking placebos are at risk, this book can be reviewed even though I have only read about half of it.

If you are a beginning programmer, you want to write in Ruby (a superb programming language for the beginner), and you don't have this book, then you are missing out. Peter Cooper writes well, takes every topic from the beginning, and explains very clearly, with examples.

The range of topics is breath-taking. The usual beginners stuff, such as numbers, expressions, strings, text processing, arrays, hashes, flow control, dates, times, ranges, classes, instances, and large numbers, is all there. But the good news is, Peter Cooper doesn't stop there. He takes you on to using libraries, debugging techniques, testing, benchmarking, profiling, connecting to and programming databases, bindings, security, threaded execution, in-line inclusions, Unicode and UTF-8 support, networking, sockets, daemons, network operations, HTML sessions, XML processing, and much more. These are topics that beginners normally do not even touch. Even though this book is not dumbed down, it is absolutely clear and easy to follow. No prior background is necessary. If you go work through this book, you will be ready to work directly with advanced Ruby references. You will not be held up by lack of Ruby knowledge.

If you want to learn Ruby, my advice is buy this book and work through it. I don't think you will need anything else until you are ready for the advanced Ruby references, at which point you should be able to write quite sophisticated programs. This book literally takes the beginner to the professional level. A great buy.

One of the best Ruby book for beginners who come from Java or just beginner.

Beginning Ruby is one of the easier books to following Ruby, and get a decent understanding Object Oriented Programming (OOP). If you don't want to fork the money over yet for this book like I did not knowing if I would understand (I just now have grown a big enough interest into programming to want to study), then I would suggest grabbing the book called Learn to Program from Pragmatic Programmer Series. In that book he runs through basic ruby syntax, and programs that actually function more or less like a BASIC application would. Once you finish the short yet insightful Learn to Program book, this book becomes even easier to follow. Once you make your way through this book though, you will want to more then likely purchase the Pragmatic Programmer Ruby book (The Red Pick Axe Book, which the 3rd version is due out in October). But from a novice programmer perspective, this is an amazing book and is always by my side.

I have dabbled in programming, but never really rolled up my sleeves to learn a language... until now. Both ruby and python seemed like great choices, and I looked for materials to play with them. Both offer some very nice features and the ability to get up and running with something useful and fun easily, yet offer plenty of room to grow. After a short evaluation period, I think I just like the "feel" of ruby better, but that's totally subjective. After settling on a language, I looked for a book.

I checked out Chris Pine's "Learn to Program", and of course _why's Poignant Guide to Ruby, and then this book. This one is, by a large margin, my favorite. Both Chris Pine's book and _why's guide have their moments, but in my opinion Cooper's book has a considerable edge in clarity and usefulness. It explains complex concepts in clear prose and then by example. I feel that I can tackle useful problems after having read the book. It seems to hit the sweet spot for being clear but not condescending, complex but not overwhelming. The examples are very applicable to many real-world problems.

This book is more of a tutorial than a reference, which is exactly what I needed as a new programmer. In addition to being a great ruby book, it's also one of the best "tech" books I've ever purchased. It's rare to see this level of quality in technical writing. I really hope Mr. Cooper continues to produce programming books.

I had heard quite a bit about Ruby, so I thought I would see what it had to offer. I went looking for an introductory book and found this one. I was hooked before the end of the first chapter. The author has an engaging writing style, and has done a great job of introducing the language and the community. The book is logically organized and presents the material in an easily comprehensible style. This is a great book for getting started with Ruby.

Since this is now my second programming language I am not going through all the growing pains that I did while first learning Perl. That said I learned a lot from my experience and the first thing I learned was that I do not learn well from the O'reilly books. I like them for reference and love their Cookbooks but I did not want to sit through another matter of fact style book with very little personality when I decided to learn Ruby. One of the things that drew me to Ruby in the first place is the atmosphere of fun that surrounds this language. I feel that this book does a very good job of teaching you the language in a way that feels like you are just hanging out and talking with the author. I also like how topics are reviewed in subsequent chapters rather than assuming that since something was explained once it was totally understood. That was a frequent problem I had when learning Perl I felt like if I did not fully understand something I had to basically start the book over. When there is something that you need to fully understand before moving forward the author points it out. I feel like I am really getting the hang or Ruby and I would buy any other offerings from this Author.

I've purchased many of the most recommended Ruby books. I find that I use this one ten times more than the others. As a beginner, this book clearly explains things, gives examples that can easily be replicated and covers most of what I needed to learn. It has a great index so it can be used as a reference guide and has very few typos. In my opinion, other ruby and rails authors who are writing for beginners could benefit greatly by adopting the format and style of this book.

This book is fantastic for anyone looking for a start with Ruby. I've read several books on Ruby and RoR over the last 6 months and this one is by far the best. The writing is clear, the programming projects show very useful concepts in a very real way, and unlike other programming books, it takes you into the community, and how to get involved. It doesn't hurt that it's written by one of the best Ruby developers out there.

I read in the last few months a lot of books in order to learn new programming languages. This is the only book that I actually enjoyed reading. It is very clear and easy to read, and it seems that the author really loves Ruby!
If you want to learn Ruby, get this book.

This's my first book on ruby and it's very good and i recommend it to
anyone who want to learn ruby and make a solid foundation of it, the
most interesting thing about this book is that it cover alot of different
topics , from the language itself to the developement cycle and
documentation generation and testing to working with files and
databases web frameworks and web developement to GUI desktop to
applications deployement and packaging and drawing a big picture for
the beginner ruby programmers all with easy and meaningfull examples
to explain the theory. it's not a reference that covers every method and
class in ruby in solid manner and it's not the beginners book that leave
you nowhere, it's the best book for beginners that will take their hands
to the first step to be proficient ruby programmer . absolutely
recommended for beginners .

Every serious Ruby programmer has a copy of the venerable 'Pickaxe' (the definitive Ruby reference manual) at their disposal, but if you're just getting you're feet wet with Ruby and serious about learning it from the ground up, then Beginning Ruby is just what you need.

The tagline 'From Novice to Professional' well describes the content. But if you're looking to delve into advanced GUI programming, then this isn't for you. This book takes you into the Ruby you need to know as the foundation for helping you become a great programmer. Peter Cooper introduces you to many critical concepts that you will need to master, but does so in a logical and easy to read manner. The text is neither dry nor whimsical, but a perfect blend between reference material and hands-on tutorial.

While I had tinkered with Ruby from 2002 onward, I never gave it any real attention until I stumbled upon Ruby on Rails in 2006. When I came to the realization my programming style looked like less of a 'style' than it did a Rube Goldberg machine, it was time to get back to basics ... and thankfully this book was published.

If you're serious about looking into Ruby, now is the time to pick this book up ... then you can go get the latest edition of 'The Pickaxe'. I almost want to buy a second copy out of sheer appreciation for Peter Cooper providing a great guide to a great programming language!

Cooper's book is by far the best introduction to Ruby I've read as well as to programming in general for beginners. He strikes (for me, at least) the right balance of showing how-to as well as the rationale behind it. It is neither too shallow nor overbearing, but steadily builds on previous lessons, always careful to point out where to find further/more up-to-date documentation.

Cooper's writing style is concise and clear. Examples are explained well. After having worked through books on AppleScript and Objective-C I wish they had been written by Cooper as well.

5 stars!

I found that the book is easy to follow and gets you started without any prior Ruby experience. It covers installation and has examples that really work to get you going. The book is a good foundation to know enough about Ruby and points you where to go next.

This is exactly what I was looking for in a book on Ruby. If you are new to Ruby, I recommend reading this book before getting into Rails.

One of the other reviews said that it's great because the author, Peter Cooper, makes some basic assumptions (like you know how to use the internet and install programs) but he doesn't assume that you know anything about programming and starts from installing Ruby itself.

I've learned a great deal very quickly, I'd recommend this book to anyone who is wanting to learn Ruby who zero to advanced programming experience.

I wanted to learn Ruby so that I could create web applications for my website in a language that was powerful yet simple to learn. This book was easy to read so that you could apply what you learned on the projects' chapters. The one noticeable flaw was that the Rails chapter should be included in the first part of the book - but not a big deal.

A great seller who delivered on a product just as described. The book itself, is a great introduction to the powers of Ruby. I'm now scouring the web for a more in depth look at the language.

I really enjoy Peter Cooper's approach to both programming and the Ruby language. The concept are well defined, and the sample code lessons really put it all together in the end. I loved this book so much, I bought it in Paper and for my Kindle.

I wanted to use ruby on rails for my web applications, but after some failed attempts I decided to learn a bit of the ruby programming language first. This book guided me to the language, even if you are new programmer I completely recommend it.

This book is for everybody, beginners and proffesional programmers that want to learn ruby. This book has a good structure and a lot of examples.