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Die Programmiersprache Ruby
"Die Programmiersprache Ruby" ist das magebliche Handbuch zu Ruby mit einer umfassenden Beschreibung der Sprachversionen 1.8 und 1.9. Es wurde fur erfahrene Programmierer geschrieben, die sich neu in Ruby einarbeiten wollen, und fur Ruby-Programmierer, die ihr Wissen erweitern und Ruby besser beherrschen wollen. Dieses Buch dokumentiert Ruby umfassend, jedoch ohne den Formalismus einer Sprachspezifikation. Ruby vom Feinsten Dieses Handbuch beginnt mit einem Tutorial zum Schnelleinstieg in die Sprache Ruby und erklart sie dann detailliert auf allen Ebenen: Lexikalische und syntaktische Struktur von Ruby-Programmen, Datentypen und Objekte, Ausdrucke und Operatoren, Anweisungen und Kontrollstrukturen, Methoden, Procs, Lambdas und Closures, Klassen und Module, Reflection und Metaprogrammierung und die Ruby-Plattform API der Ruby-Plattform Die Programmiersprache Ruby beinhaltet eine umfassende Einfuhrung in die machtige API der Ruby-Plattform und stellt - mit ausfuhrlich kommentiertem Code - die Moglichkeiten von Ruby in Bezug auf Textbearbeitung, mathematische Berechnungen, Collections, Ein-/Ausgabe, Netzwerkverarbeitung und Concurrency vor. Wenn Sie Ruby wirklich verstehen wollen, ist dies das Buch, das Sie brauchen.
480 pages, ebook
First published January 1, 2008
131 people are currently reading
748 people want to read
About the author
David Flanagan
33 books34 followersDavid Flanagan is a computer programmer who has spent much of the last 20 years writing books about programming languages. He now works at Mozilla. David lives with his wife and children in the Pacific Northwest, between the cities of Seattle and Vancouver.
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Displaying 1 - 30 of 35 reviews
March 23, 2009
This book provides comprehensive documentation of the Ruby programming language (1.8.x and 1.9.x) by the language's creator, Yukihiro Matsumoto, and David Flanagan (from Javascript: The Definitive Guide and Java in a Nutshell fame).
Ruby is an easy language to program in, but it is not a simple language. This book is intended for experienced programmers who want to master Ruby. It is not a beginner's book, although it does take a bottoms up approach -- it is intended to be read in the order it is written. If you've got the capacity and willingness to read carefully and think through the examples, this book will reward you many times over with knowledge and insight.
Ruby is an easy language to program in, but it is not a simple language. This book is intended for experienced programmers who want to master Ruby. It is not a beginner's book, although it does take a bottoms up approach -- it is intended to be read in the order it is written. If you've got the capacity and willingness to read carefully and think through the examples, this book will reward you many times over with knowledge and insight.
July 28, 2020
So far what I want to write have been written by people.
May 14, 2011
I was familiar with Dave Flanagan through his Javascript book. Seeing his name on the cover of this book was all I needed to buy it. And of course it doesn't hurt that Matz -- Ruby's creator -- was the other author. But to be fair, I had seen Matz' work in O'Reilly's "Beautiful Code" -- an essay called "Treating Code as an Essay." It was not only the best piece of writing in that book, but one of the best essays on programming I've ever read. It prompted me to scour the Internet for more of his writing, which lead to some great interviews on artima.com.
Although I could not tell you who wrote what, the combination in general is perfect. Flanagan's writing is always concise, practical, and to the point, with good examples. Like the late W. Richard Stevens -- he has a knack of anticipating your questions as you read and answering them. Matz insists on breathing life and humanity into what could otherwise result in dry technical treatment. His personality is to make things fun, which is why Ruby is such a wonderful language. While I am hardly a language aficionado, of the few languages I do know -- C/C++, Lua, Perl, Python, Ruby and Javascript -- Ruby is by far the most enjoyable, readable, concise, powerful, and overall easy to use of them all.
The book is solid all the way through. And it lived up to Ruby's prime directive: it made this programmer happy. There are some other Ruby books out there that are very good indeed. But if I was limited to only one, this would be it.
Although I could not tell you who wrote what, the combination in general is perfect. Flanagan's writing is always concise, practical, and to the point, with good examples. Like the late W. Richard Stevens -- he has a knack of anticipating your questions as you read and answering them. Matz insists on breathing life and humanity into what could otherwise result in dry technical treatment. His personality is to make things fun, which is why Ruby is such a wonderful language. While I am hardly a language aficionado, of the few languages I do know -- C/C++, Lua, Perl, Python, Ruby and Javascript -- Ruby is by far the most enjoyable, readable, concise, powerful, and overall easy to use of them all.
The book is solid all the way through. And it lived up to Ruby's prime directive: it made this programmer happy. There are some other Ruby books out there that are very good indeed. But if I was limited to only one, this would be it.
May 8, 2023
This is the best introduction to a programming language I have ever come across. It's the perfect mixture of every day language and technical depth so that you can come away feeling quite familiar with the ins and outs of Ruby without feeling overwhelmed by jargon. This is a perfect second resource if you are an absolute beginner and an excellent first resource if you have experience with other languages before coming to Ruby. I struggled for a long time to find something that filled in the gap between weak online tutorials made for highschool students and the existential horror of just reading documentation. This is it.
December 29, 2011
Excellent intermediate-level guide to the Ruby programming language. It discusses every feature, every nuance, and every "gotcha" that arises from ambiguity or as a trade-off for flexibility and expressiveness. Like other O'Reilly "nutshell" books, this book covers the language, the whole language, and nothing but the language. It doesn't waste a single precious sentence on anything but details. This makes it very dense to read, but very efficient, and makes it an excellent reference. No intermediate Ruby developer can get away with not reading this book.
May 4, 2009
This book contains less fluff than the Pickaxe book. While Pickaxe is good for quickly learning about Ruby and trying out some things, along with a so-so appendix of std classes, this book contains more in-depth detail on the core language constructs and behavior. Combined, they make a great reference duo.
November 12, 2023
To say this language is in decline may be a bit of an understatement. Looking on Ruby gems for all my favourite PyPi module alternatives was a little depressing. They often don't exist or haven't been updated since 2008, 2010, maybe 2013 if you're lucky. The exception being Rails, which isn't so much a substitute for a PyPi module, but a good reason to use the language for web dev.
It's hard to ignore the primacy of Python as the default scripting language for fast iteration and ease of use. Still, there's something to be said for Ruby. It's use of code blocks are elegant and, despite not being the languages only implementation of (or even identified as) lambda functions, their ubiquity was, for me at least, a good way of softly enforcing a functional coding practice I've mostly avoided.
Whereas Python will often have one, or at least limited, ways of doing something, Ruby has many. Plus aliases. This makes the learning curve perhaps steeper, but ultimately gives more flexibility. Why use for i in range(1,11), when you can simply specify 1..10, etc.
I love ! To end methods that are in-place, and no exclamation otherwise. This could be so great in other languages. Similarly, why not include a ? at the end for methods returning booleans (or in Ruby's case the special values true or false or nil). Sadly, these would be naming exceptions in other languages.
Similarly, def +(number) makes much more sense than def __add__(self, other). Is @ more elegant than self.? I'm unsure.
The collections are odd though. Set has to be imported, so isn't a default data structure. Instead we have arrays (more like a Pythonic list than a C array), which can be frozen to behave like a mutable data structure (e.g. tuple), and also hashes (dictionaries). Arrays have union and intersection methods to try and make them dual purpose, like a set, but they ultimately fail without some additional work.
My eyes started to glaze over as we got stuck in the weeds of procs and lambdas and mix-ins, but I feel this may be because of the flow of the book and writing style. I am also painfully aware these minutiae of implementation will have changed by Ruby 3.3, especially as this book focused so heavily on the changes between 1.8 and 1.9.
(This book was £2.80 secondhand on Amazon, with input from the language creator. A book on the latest implementation was roughly £45 by comparison.)
It's hard to ignore the primacy of Python as the default scripting language for fast iteration and ease of use. Still, there's something to be said for Ruby. It's use of code blocks are elegant and, despite not being the languages only implementation of (or even identified as) lambda functions, their ubiquity was, for me at least, a good way of softly enforcing a functional coding practice I've mostly avoided.
Whereas Python will often have one, or at least limited, ways of doing something, Ruby has many. Plus aliases. This makes the learning curve perhaps steeper, but ultimately gives more flexibility. Why use for i in range(1,11), when you can simply specify 1..10, etc.
I love ! To end methods that are in-place, and no exclamation otherwise. This could be so great in other languages. Similarly, why not include a ? at the end for methods returning booleans (or in Ruby's case the special values true or false or nil). Sadly, these would be naming exceptions in other languages.
Similarly, def +(number) makes much more sense than def __add__(self, other). Is @ more elegant than self.? I'm unsure.
The collections are odd though. Set has to be imported, so isn't a default data structure. Instead we have arrays (more like a Pythonic list than a C array), which can be frozen to behave like a mutable data structure (e.g. tuple), and also hashes (dictionaries). Arrays have union and intersection methods to try and make them dual purpose, like a set, but they ultimately fail without some additional work.
My eyes started to glaze over as we got stuck in the weeds of procs and lambdas and mix-ins, but I feel this may be because of the flow of the book and writing style. I am also painfully aware these minutiae of implementation will have changed by Ruby 3.3, especially as this book focused so heavily on the changes between 1.8 and 1.9.
(This book was £2.80 secondhand on Amazon, with input from the language creator. A book on the latest implementation was roughly £45 by comparison.)
February 23, 2025
A walkthrough of some R and Ruby functions to perform basic data analysis, where each chapter tells a little personal story to justify a simulation or data extraction of interest to the author. The witty writing makes the book tolerable but I have a hard time imagining the intended audience: if you have never coded anything in R or Ruby, I'm not sure you'd appreciate the book. Also I couldn't tell whether the chapter "How to be an armchair economist" was satirical.
December 13, 2017
Gave me great basics about ruby programming language
April 4, 2013
Good book for a detailed look at the language.
It presents the material well and is clear in it's explanations and examples. It does a particularly good job of expressing the theory behind features of the language and it positions you to really understand what is going on behind the scenes well.
On the down side the book is a bit too linear and doesn't get to classes/modules or even how to break code up into files until later in the book. This means you're tinkering for quiet some time and it's awhile until you can do anything fun.
It presents the material well and is clear in it's explanations and examples. It does a particularly good job of expressing the theory behind features of the language and it positions you to really understand what is going on behind the scenes well.
On the down side the book is a bit too linear and doesn't get to classes/modules or even how to break code up into files until later in the book. This means you're tinkering for quiet some time and it's awhile until you can do anything fun.
September 2, 2013
This probably works better as a reference book after you learn Ruby than as an actual intro to Ruby (is that how ALL O'Reilly books work? I felt that way about the only other book I read from them, way back). Seems to be structured in a way that leads to a lot of "hands off" learning before you get to do anything, but you sure do learn a lot. Partway through I was struggling with it and tried to switch to learning from a website, but the site made me appreciate how much I'd already learned from the book so I stuck with it.
August 1, 2014
I must confess...I never really finished this book. Python is my language of choice. I've mostly picked this up to manage some of the existing Ruby code in my organization.
First things first, this book is not for beginners. If you do not have much experience with tech or code, go elsewhere. This book reads more like documentation with helpful examples, starting from the ground up. I must say though, if you've got a little experience with code, this book will probably get you a thorough understanding of the languages' core features.
First things first, this book is not for beginners. If you do not have much experience with tech or code, go elsewhere. This book reads more like documentation with helpful examples, starting from the ground up. I must say though, if you've got a little experience with code, this book will probably get you a thorough understanding of the languages' core features.
August 10, 2016
Its language can be a bit dry and technical, but this is a solid book particularly if you were already a programmer when you picked it up and want to get to know Ruby. It explains the language from the ground-up, with the next chapter building on the previous, in a simple and unpretentious manner.
This is not a fun, hipster-y book about Ruby - there's hardly any fluff here. But it's great to build a general understanding of the language and I've come back to it since I've read it for reference.
This is not a fun, hipster-y book about Ruby - there's hardly any fluff here. But it's great to build a general understanding of the language and I've come back to it since I've read it for reference.
January 7, 2014
This book does what it aims to do perfectly: document the entire Ruby language. David Flannagan has covered every aspect of Ruby with a very good pace.
This book, as it says on the back cover, is not for anyone who's getting into programming. However, if you know any other language or have beginner to intermediate Ruby knowledge, this book will make you an expert in Ruby.
This book, as it says on the back cover, is not for anyone who's getting into programming. However, if you know any other language or have beginner to intermediate Ruby knowledge, this book will make you an expert in Ruby.
February 29, 2012
Not a real page-turner but a ton of great details on Ruby. I use it most days at the office to look up how to do things in Ruby or get a better understanding of how things are working under the covers.
September 26, 2012
Great and detailed intro to the Ruby. This is "the one" book for any beginner. Provides you with the insights of the language, introduces new concepts and provides great examples for better understanding.
April 18, 2021
This is the classic Ruby Programming Language book. I read it around 2013 and liked it at the time. If you like classic programming languages books, you will probably like this one too. They seem to follow the same structure and this one is not an exception.
February 15, 2010
As a programming reference, one of the best I've ever read; although, the book has some pretty egregious formatting errors. (You can do better, copy editor.)
April 12, 2010
This book is pretty technical - which makes it both a great reference and not a great DIY learn how to program Ruby.
October 4, 2010
Comprehensive coverage of the Ruby language, modeled after The C++ Programming Language.
It's probably best used as a reference, rather than cover-to-cover.
It's probably best used as a reference, rather than cover-to-cover.
February 27, 2011
An excellent and a must read book on the Ruby programming language.
January 10, 2011
Good book on the ruby programming language. Not a page turner but works well as a more concise guide than the Programming Ruby for beginning Ruby Programmers.
March 17, 2011
Chapter on blocks, procs and lamdas was a little confusing.
Could have done with more examples of building real code over API documentation.
Could have done with more examples of building real code over API documentation.
October 19, 2011
Not as good as the Pickaxe, but fine none the less, IMHO.
February 22, 2012
Absolutely comprehensive, but not a boring read at all. So many corners to explore!
March 27, 2012
Very good Ruby book. After reading find a lot of things I didn't know before.
September 27, 2012
A good start to finish intro. I learned Ruby from this book very easily; 0 to fluency took about three days.
March 16, 2013
a must book for ruby programmer
November 24, 2013
Probably the best book on programming that I've read.
June 6, 2014
Instructive but dry.
Displaying 1 - 30 of 35 reviews