Book Review: Ruby Cookbook

This is the first book review that I've done where I haven't read the complete book. But to be fair, this book is actually a reference, and, coming in at almost 900 pages, Ruby Cookbook, by Lucas Carlson and Leonard Richardson, is a fine reference that I'll be sure to keep near.

Like any good cookbook, this book is composed of recipes. And the recipe collection is very comprehensive, starting from simple examples involving strings, arrays, hashes, etc. to higher level concepts like classes, objects and meta-programming. The authors touch upon such useful topics as testing and packaging your Ruby code for distribution. All recipes start out with a problem, a solution, and then a discussion that expands a bit on the topic. And each chapter has a little introduction to that area as well, so it's worth to read the beginning of a chapter before diving into a recipe.

I've actually used quite a few of these, and read some others just for interest and learning. For anyone serious about learning Ruby or perfecting their skills, I highly recommend keeping this book close at hand. I give this book a 10 out of 10.