2014-12-03 Wednesday - Book Review: Effective Ruby

My Book Review:

Expert Guidance on Ruby's Ways

When you buy a book to expand your knowledge of something, you hope that the author has used the pages to communicate worthwhile lessons - and a good book is liking having a teacher by your side.  For my personal preference, an even better style is when the author acts much as a mountain guide - not only showing you the right way - but also calling out the dangers and risks of less efficient paths...or paths that will lead you astray.

In "Effective Ruby, 48 Specific Ways to Write Better Ruby", Peter J. Jones demonstrates his knowledge of Ruby - in a hands-on and practical manner - achieving the much deserved accolade as both teacher and guide.

The clarity of writing is reminiscent of Kernighan and Ritchie, Scott Meyers, and Joshua Bloch

Ruby is a worthwhile language to have in your toolbox - and this book is a welcome addition to my technical library.




Chapter 1: Accustoming Yourself to Ruby
Chapter 2: Classes, Objects, and Modules
Chapter 3: Collections
Chapter 4: Exceptions
Chapter 5: Metaprogramming
Chapter 6: Testing
Chapter 7: Tools and Libraries
Chapter 8: Memory Management and Performance

2008-11-19 Wednesday - QCon 2008 Day-1 morning

Disclaimer: There may be some many mistakes/errors in my blog notes for QCon over the next few days - as I am writing these posts while I'm sitting in sessions - and much of these notes are stream-of-consciousness - as I try to keep up with the presenters.

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I'm in San Francisco attending QCon 2008 this week.

Martin Fowler gave a good keynote (with Rebecca Parsons) this morning - which I arrived 1/2 way through due to a slight flight arrival delay.

Ruby

10:15AM...Gregg Pollack kicked-off the Ruby track

11AM...I'm sitting in a Ruby presentation that is currently covering Merb
Presenter: Matt Aimonetti, he maintains blogs at:

merbist.com
railsontherun.com

One interesting point made during this morning's Ruby presentations: Ruby's historical bad performance reputation may not be currently valid given certain performance improvements (e.g. Merb compared to raw PHP, leading PHP frameworks, Django, Rails, Code Igniter, etc.)

Merb has three architecture layers (extension points ?):
plugins
slices
API

Merb's adaptability allows replacing core functionality with custom implementations

Benefits of Merb for developing/deploying Ruby applications:
- scalability
- performance
- modularity
- small memory footprint


Take-aways:
- Ruby is not slow
- Merb is flexible
- Merb is modular
- Merb is very scalable

- Yellowpages.com is using Merb for some backend components

- Wikipedia is investigating possible usage of Merb

- Matz (developer of Ruby) "Merb has a bright future...[thinks] will give users more freedom in a Ruby-ish way of programming"