| | |  | Remote Access | Home » » » Ruby Cookbook (Cookbooks (O'Reilly)) | | | | | | | Product Promotions: | | | | | Description: | | Do you want to push Ruby to its limits? The Ruby Cookbook is the most comprehensive problem-solving guide to today's hottest programming language. It gives you hundreds of solutions to real-world problems, with clear explanations and thousands of lines of code you can use in your own projects. From data structures and algorithms, to integration with cutting-edge technologies, the Ruby Cookbook has something for every programmer. Beginners and advanced Rubyists alike will learn how to program with: - Strings and numbers
- Arrays and hashes
- Classes, modules, and namespaces
- Reflection and metaprogramming
- XML and HTML processing
- Ruby on Rails (including Ajax integration)
- Databases
- Graphics
- Internet services like email, SSH, and BitTorrent
- Web services
- Multitasking
- Graphical and terminal interfaces
If you need to write a web application, this book shows you how to get started with Rails. If you're a system administrator who needs to rename thousands of files, you'll see how to use Ruby for this and other everyday tasks. You'll learn how to read and write Excel spreadsheets, classify text with Bayesian filters, and create PDF files. We've even included a few silly tricks that were too cool to leave out, like how to blink the lights on your keyboard. The Ruby Cookbook is the most useful book yet written about Ruby. When you need to solve a problem, don't reinvent the wheel: look it up in the Cookbook.
| | | Features: | |
• ISBN13: 9780596523695
• Condition: New
• Notes: BRAND NEW FROM PUBLISHER! 100% Satisfaction Guarantee. Tracking provided on most orders. Buy with Confidence! Millions of books sold!
| | | Product Details: | | | Author:
| Lucas Carlson | | Paperback:
| 910 pages | | Publisher:
| O'Reilly Media | | Publication Date:
| July 26, 2006 | | Language:
| English | | ISBN:
| 0596523696 | | Product Length:
| 9.32 inches | | Product Width:
| 6.96 inches | | Product Height:
| 1.58 inches | | Product Weight:
| 2.85 pounds | | Package Length:
| 9.0 inches | | Package Width:
| 7.0 inches | | Package Height:
| 1.6 inches | | Package Weight:
| 2.9 pounds | | Average Customer Rating:
|  based on 30 reviews |
| | | | Used and New: | | | |
| All | |
| $2.20 | Used
- Mint | | | $2.20 | Used
- Good | | | $2.20 | Used
- Good | | | $3.81 | Used
- Good | | | $3.83 | Used
- Good | | | $3.99 | Used
- Mint | | | $5.00 | Used
- Good | | | $5.25 | Used
- Good | | | $6.18 This item is eligible for FREE Super Saver Shipping on orders over $25. | Used
- Good | | | $6.49 | Used
- Acceptable | | | $6.50 | Used
- Good | | | $7.54 | Used
- VeryGood | | | $9.88 | Used
- VeryGood | | | $9.90 | Used
- Mint | | | $9.90 | Used
- VeryGood | | | $10.24 | Used
- Good | | | $10.99 | Used
- VeryGood | | | $11.24 | Used
- Acceptable | | | $12.00 | Collectible
- VeryGood | | | $12.98 | Used
- Good | | | $14.50 | Used
- VeryGood | | | $14.90 | Used
- VeryGood | | | $16.00 | Used
- Mint | | | $16.78 | Used
- Mint | | | $17.50 | Used
- VeryGood | | | $18.00 | New | | | $20.00 | Used
- VeryGood | | | $20.00 | Used
- Mint | | | $23.95 | Used
- VeryGood | | | $24.99 | Collectible
- Mint | | | $27.33 | Used
- VeryGood | | | $28.52 | New | | | $28.52 | New | | | $28.97 | New | | | $30.00 | Used
- Mint | | | $30.00 | New | | | $30.00 | New | | | $30.99 This item ships for FREE with Super Saver Shipping. | New | | | $31.49 This item ships for FREE with Super Saver Shipping. | New | | | $35.33 | New | | | $35.69 | Used
- VeryGood | | | $38.32 | New | | | $38.52 | New | | | $38.52 | New | | | $38.56 | New | | | $38.56 | Used
- Mint | | | $38.75 | New | | | $39.49 | New | | | $39.96 | New | | | $40.15 | New | | | $40.85 | Used
- Mint | | | $41.54 | New | | | $41.54 | Used
- Mint | | | $42.17 | New | | | $43.17 | New | | | $44.51 | Used
- Mint | | | $49.99 | New | | | $49.99 | New | | | $49.99 | New | | | $51.36 | New | | | $53.54 | New | | | $57.40 | New | | | $58.00 | New | | | $58.03 | New | | | $62.52 | New | | | $65.97 | Used
- Mint | | | $67.98 | Used
- Mint | | | $68.06 | New | | | $70.54 | Used
- Mint | | | $76.16 | Used
- VeryGood | | | $81.60 | New | | | $98.14 | New | |
| New | |
| $18.00 | New | | | $28.52 | New | | | $28.52 | New | | | $28.97 | New | | | $30.00 | New | | | $30.00 | New | | | $30.99 This item ships for FREE with Super Saver Shipping. | New | | | $31.49 This item ships for FREE with Super Saver Shipping. | New | | | $35.33 | New | | | $38.32 | New | | | $38.52 | New | | | $38.52 | New | | | $38.56 | New | | | $38.75 | New | | | $39.49 | New | | | $39.96 | New | | | $40.15 | New | | | $41.54 | New | | | $42.17 | New | | | $43.17 | New | | | $49.99 | New | | | $49.99 | New | | | $49.99 | New | | | $51.36 | New | | | $53.54 | New | | | $57.40 | New | | | $58.00 | New | | | $58.03 | New | | | $62.52 | New | | | $68.06 | New | | | $81.60 | New | | | $98.14 | New | |
| Used | |
| $2.20 | Used
- Mint | | | $2.20 | Used
- Good | | | $2.20 | Used
- Good | | | $3.81 | Used
- Good | | | $3.83 | Used
- Good | | | $3.99 | Used
- Mint | | | $5.00 | Used
- Good | | | $5.25 | Used
- Good | | | $6.18 This item is eligible for FREE Super Saver Shipping on orders over $25. | Used
- Good | | | $6.49 | Used
- Acceptable | | | $6.50 | Used
- Good | | | $7.54 | Used
- VeryGood | | | $9.88 | Used
- VeryGood | | | $9.90 | Used
- Mint | | | $9.90 | Used
- VeryGood | | | $10.24 | Used
- Good | | | $10.99 | Used
- VeryGood | | | $11.24 | Used
- Acceptable | | | $12.98 | Used
- Good | | | $14.50 | Used
- VeryGood | | | $14.90 | Used
- VeryGood | | | $16.00 | Used
- Mint | | | $16.78 | Used
- Mint | | | $17.50 | Used
- VeryGood | | | $20.00 | Used
- VeryGood | | | $20.00 | Used
- Mint | | | $23.95 | Used
- VeryGood | | | $27.33 | Used
- VeryGood | | | $30.00 | Used
- Mint | | | $35.69 | Used
- VeryGood | | | $38.56 | Used
- Mint | | | $40.85 | Used
- Mint | | | $41.54 | Used
- Mint | | | $44.51 | Used
- Mint | | | $65.97 | Used
- Mint | | | $67.98 | Used
- Mint | | | $70.54 | Used
- Mint | | | $76.16 | Used
- VeryGood | |
| Collectible | |
| $12.00 | Collectible
- VeryGood | | | $24.99 | Collectible
- Mint | |
| | | | Customer Reviews: | |
Average Customer Review:
 ( 30 customer reviews )
Write an online review and share your thoughts with other customers.
Most Helpful Customer Reviews
49 of 52 found the following review helpful:
 An essential cookbookAug 29, 2006
By A Williams
"honestpuck"
I have a confession to make. Over more than twenty years as a programmer I'd never really had my head around object-oriented programming. I started out using C and then tried PHP and Perl and treated both as purely procedural languages (indeed, one Perl guru looked at my code and said "you were a C programmer weren't you"; humbling). Java, JavaScript, C++ and even Objective C had their turn at getting me to convert but none took (though I do code JavaScript under sufferance) until Ruby. A few month ago I started using Rails and became hooked on it and the underlying language. My Rails and Ruby skills have progressed in leaps and bounds. I've already had a good read of "Programming Ruby" and "Agile Web Development with Rails" and enjoyed and learnt from both.
I also have to admit to loving the O'Reilly "Cookbook" series. Several, particularly the "Perl Cookbook", have pride of place on the bookshelf closest to my computer. So the "Ruby Cookbook" by Lucas Carlson and Leonard Richardson was eagerly awaited. The "Cookbook" series are designed to provide you with a plethora of code examples to guide you in writing your own code. I'm definitely a hands-on style of learner and the Cookbook series suits my style - I can start getting my hands dirty with complex problems knowing I have help to code my way of out of the tight spots. This one covers a wide range of tasks from simple, such as walking a directory tree or manipulating text and numbers, through to more complex such as working with AJAX in Ruby on Rails. If you have't previously come across a book in this style then each chapter is broken up into a number of 'recipes' with a problem, a solution and then discussion of the solution.
This sort of book lives and dies by two criteria - the quality of the code and the usefulness of the recipe selection. "Ruby Cookbook" wins on both. The topics covered are wide and leave little, if any, part of the language unexplained. They start with data and structures such as strings and hashes before moving on to code blocks, objects, classes and modules. There is then an intriguing chapter on reflection and metaprogramming that I am still puzzling through before the book moves on to more internet based topics such as XML, HTML, web and internet services and, of course, Rails. The book then proceeds with chapters on the necessary housekeeping of development such as testing, packaging and automating tasks with Rake before finishing with extending Ruby with other languages and system administration tasks. The code is well written; clear and well commented, easily understandable by a virtual newb like me. The discussion is fairly clear, seemingly concise while allowing you to understand the code and how it might be changed for particular purposes.
I'm not going to go into more details as to the contents but instead point you to the book's page at O'Reilly which includes a link to the contents, listnig all the recipes in the book, and two example chapters; Chapter 7 on code blocks and iteration and Chapter 15 devoted to Rails. Together they will give you a good feel for the style and contents of the book.
The book is well written and well edited. I've already tried over a dozen of the recipes and haven't found a single code error, so my faith in the other 300 or so has risen considerably. The discussion that accompanies each recipe is a marvelous way of learning just that little bit more about the language. I found them quite good, though the odd one could do with further explanation if the book is to stand on its own - for example the discussion accompanying the recipe to iterate over a hash was not perfectly clear on the difference between Hash#each and Hash#each_pair.
At more than 800 pages this is a large and extensive volume, though the price may make you wince. Usually programming books this large have at least part of their size dedicated to something I refer to as pseudo-padding, some sort of reference or simple language explanation - this one has neither, all of it is devoted to the recipes.
With Ruby use, thanks in no part to the popularity of Rails, growing by leaps and bounds I'm sure this volume will be a well deserved bestseller. I give it four stars and recommend it to all but the most expert Ruby programmers. For beginners who, like me, appreciate hands on learning it is a must.
13 of 14 found the following review helpful:
 A definite keeperSep 01, 2006
By orangekay
Some O'Reilly books are horrible, and some are great--this happens to be one of the better ones. It's full of concise examples of how to use Ruby's standard libraries and most popular extensions that more than make up for their frequently terrible and always unnavigable RubyDoc generated documentation. An excellent next step for those who've read through "Programming Ruby" and are wondering how to put the language's better features to good use without becoming completely dependent on any of the currently popular application frameworks I'd guess about 90% of people are learning Ruby for. It even covers RubyCocoa basics.
I have found a couple typos here and there, but mostly just misplaced spaces and omitted words; nothing dangerous so far.
7 of 7 found the following review helpful:
Useful - keep it by your sideAug 11, 2006
By Giovanni Corriga
Ok. Let's pretend you're a Java programmer, and you want to know what's the story about this Ruby language you've heard so much about. Or maybe, like me, you're a Smug Smalltalk Weenie and you want to check how the young cousin from the East is doing. Either way, you got your hands on a manual or on a tutorial, and now you're reasonably sure you have a good grasp of the language. But you still have to learn the slang, and _that_ is the difficult part.
But don't worry, here comes the Ruby Cookbook to the rescue. The book is a full, 850-pages behemoth full of Ruby tips and tricks, from string manipulation to database management, from reflection to multitasking.
Presenting their tips in the usual O'Reilly cookbook format (problem/solution/discussion), the two authors cover almost all the topics of interest for both the beginner and the expert Ruby programmer.
All in all, the Ruby Cookbook is like a dictionary that you should keep by your side when you're programming in Ruby. The only small con is the high number of typos, especially in the first part: nothing which stops you from understanding what the authors are saying, but finding a typo in almost every page of a chapter gets tiresome after a while.
Anyway, you can't go wrong by buying this book.
6 of 6 found the following review helpful:
Great collection of Ruby recipes and techniquesJan 02, 2007
By calvinnme
This cookbook is aimed at people who know at least a little bit of Ruby, or who know a fair amount about programming in general. This book isn't a Ruby tutorial, but if you're already familiar with a few other programming languages, you should be able to pick up Ruby by going through the first 10 chapters of this book. This book contains recipes suitable for all skill levels. It focuses mainly on generic programming techniques, but it also covers specific application frameworks such as Ruby on Rails and GUI libraries, as well as best practices such as unit testing. I discuss the book further in the context of the table of contents:
The book starts with six chapters covering Ruby's built-in data structures.
Chapter 1, Strings, contains recipes for building, processing, and manipulating strings of text. There are a few recipes specifically applicable to regular expressions (Recipes 1.17, 1.18, and 1.19).
Chapter 2, Numbers, covers the representation of different types of numbers: real numbers, complex numbers, arbitrary-precision decimals, and so on. It also includes Ruby implementations of common mathematical and statistical algorithms, and explains some Ruby quirks you'll run into if you create your own numeric types (Recipes 2.13 and 2.14).
Chapter 3, Date and Time, covers Ruby's two interfaces for dealing with time: the one based on the C time library, which may be familiar to you from other programming languages, and the one implemented in pure Ruby, which is more idiomatic.
Chapter 4, Arrays, introduces the array, Ruby's simplest compound data type.
Chapter 5, Hashes, covers the hash, Ruby's other basic compound data type.
Chapter 6, Files and Directories, covers techniques for reading, writing, and manipulating files. This chapter also covers Ruby's standard libraries for searching and manipulating the filesystem.
The next four are more abstract and are about Ruby idiom and philosophy.
Chapter 7, Code Blocks and Iteration, contains recipes that explore the possibilities of Ruby's code blocks, also known as closures.
Chapter 8, Objects and Classes, contains recipes for writing different types of classes and methods, and a few recipes that demonstrate capabilities of all Ruby objects such as freezing and cloning.
Chapter 9, Modules and Namespaces, covers Ruby's modules. These constructs are used to "mix" new behavior into existing classes and to segregate functionality into different namespaces.
Chapter 10, Reflection and Metaprogramming, covers techniques for programatically exploring and modifying Ruby class definitions.
The next three chapters talk about specific file formats and Ruby.
Chapter 11, XML and HTML, shows how to handle the most popular data interchange formats. The chapter deals mostly with parsing other people's XML documents and web pages (see Recipe 11.9).
Chapter 12, Graphics and Other File Formats, covers data interchange formats other than XML and HTML, with a special focus on generating and manipulating graphics.
Chapter 13, Databases and Persistence, covers the best Ruby interfaces to data storage formats. This chapter demonstrates everything from different ways of serializing data and indexing text, to the Ruby client libraries for popular SQL databases, to full-blown abstraction layers like ActiveRecord that save you from having to write SQL at all.
Currently the most popular use of Ruby is in network applications, mostly through Ruby on Rails. There are three chapters devoted to different types of applications.
Chapter 14, Internet Services, kicks off our networking coverage by illustrating a wide variety of clients and servers written with Ruby libraries.
Chapter 15, Web Development: Ruby on Rails, covers the web application framework that's been driving so much of Ruby's recent popularity.
Chapter 16, Web Services and Distributed Programming, covers two techniques for sharing information between computers during a Ruby program.
Next are three chapters on the auxilliary tasks that surround the main programming work of a project.
Chapter 17, Testing, Debugging, Optimizing, and Documenting, focuses mainly on handling exception conditions and creating unit tests for your code. There are also several recipes on the processes of debugging and optimization.
Chapter 18, Packaging and Distributing Software, mainly deals with Ruby's Gem packaging system and the RubyForge server that hosts many gem files. The chapter also shows you how to create and distribute gems for your own projects.
Chapter 19, Automating Tasks with Rake, covers the most popular Ruby build tool.
The book closes with four chapters on miscellaneous topics.
Chapter 20, Multitasking and Multithreading, shows how to use threads to do more than one thing at once, and how to use Unix subprocesses to run external commands.
Chapter 21, User Interface, discusses the command-line interface, character-based GUIs with Curses and HighLine, GUI toolkits for various platforms, and more obscure kinds of user interfaces (Recipe 21.11).
Chapter 22, Extending Ruby with Other Languages, focuses on hooking up Ruby to other languages, either for performance or to get access to more libraries. There is one recipe about JRuby, the Ruby implementation that runs on the Java Virtual Machine (Recipe 22.5).
Chapter 23, System Administration, is full of self-contained programs for doing administrative tasks, usually using techniques from other chapters. The recipes have a heavy focus on Unix administration, but there are some resources for Windows users (including Recipe 23.2), and some cross-platform scripts.
2 of 2 found the following review helpful:
Bulky but efficientMay 28, 2009
By waveninja
"http://geekatlarge.blogspot.com"
I bought this book on a shopping spree. Just needed a 3rd book to add to my shopping basket for a '3 = 2' promotion, it had good reviews so I bought it.
Ruby Cookbook
This book is not a straightforward learning book. It contains just a whole lot of 'recipes', small solutions for common problems. This book is not meant to be read in your bed from beginning to end. Rather it's something to grab on to when you want to do something but don't know how. Each chapter deals with a certain topic such as system administration, GUI's, multitasking, testing, webservices, Rake, databases, Internet services, Rails, metaprogramming and a whole lot of more basic language recipe's such as matching strings with regular expressions or comparing floating point numbers. It's a big fat book with nearly 900 pages.
Conclusion
Well, this is somewhat difficult as it's not a book to read from beginning to end. When I used the book, I have always found the solution for my problem in no time. It just covers a whole lot things. The recipes are short and clear and contain references for further information. It's a really good book and writing this review I am actually surprised I have used it so little times. Since it's such a big book, and not something to read in one piece, It's easy to put on your shelf, forget about it and use Google for help, like I did. The fact is however, that in all cases I thought about the book, it provided the answer I needed.
Given that, this book's pretty efficient. It saves a lot of time providing solutions and you don't even have to read the whole thing. Personally I think this book comes not to it's right on the bookshelf, but more as a desktop companion. Consider a digital version to keep around and CRTL-F when in need.
[...]
See all 30 customer reviews on Amazon.com
| | |
|
