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Discussion on: Which ruby book would you recommend?

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thorstenhirsch profile image
Thorsten Hirsch • Edited

The Poignant Guide is indeed insane. It's somehow pretty similar to the "Head First..." series. Even though I like their idea it turned out that I don't like them. To my own surprise the visualisations were of no help for me, instead they were a distraction. I am a visual learner, but it seems like I need to make my own visualisations and cannot learn with these gimmicky comics.

I like:

  • Practical Objected Oriented Design in Ruby
  • Eloquent Ruby
  • Metaprogramming Ruby

The last one sounds pretty advanced, but it is the best one in this list. In this book the title is explained like this:

in Ruby metaprogramming is actually only programming

I'm pretty sure this is not true for all other languages. Whether you agree or not - this book teaches the OO architecture of ruby in depth, which helped me a lot for designing the class hierarchy of my own applications.

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neotamizhan profile image
Siddharth Venkatesan

All three books listed here were excellent. Having followed Sandy Matz's talks and podcasts for a while, her Practical Object Oriented Design in Ruby was close to heart. It helped instill some good OOP practices which helped beyond ruby as well. Metaprogramming Ruby was also an interesting book. It taught walking on hands (which was how metaprogramming seemed to me) in a lucid and fun way...