"Programming Ruby: The Pragmatic Programmer's Guide" (Addison-Wesley; ISBN 0-201-71089-7) by Dave Thomas and Andrew Hunt is by the authors of "The Pragmatic Programmer", which is a good practical guide of how to program. It is tough to review their book because I know Dave Thomas personally and he is a top notch guy. I was surprised that this book came out so close on the heels of the other one. After "The Pragmatic Programmer", I got the impression from Dave that he was ready to take a break from book writing.

Ruby is an object-oriented programming scripting language that is an alternative to Perl or Python. It is not in competition with Java even those a certain Dallas weekly misquoted Dave as saying as such.

Before continuing the review, I will point out that I've been a Perl programmer for over 10 years. I used to write scripts all the time. Nowadays I do it twice a year so it is not productive for me to switch to a new language. I thought Perl 4 was a nice language (it is not write-only as some people claim). I also think that the OO extensions in Perl 5 were a bad mistake. The mix of procedural and OO is one language is a bad idea (take a look at C++) in my opinion. I haven't really looked at Python, but I feel that any language that depends behavior on identation is a mistake.

I won't go chapter by chapter through the book in this review for two reasons. One is that I honestly only read snippets of the book here and there. The reason for this was basically that being busy I wasn't going to invest time into a language that I wasn't going to use. This should not be held against the book. The other is that the contents are very typical of a new programming language book.

Andrew and Dave did their usual job of writing clearly and yet keep it interesting at the same time. This is great since there are only two Ruby books in existance and the other one Amazon doesn't even have in stock. Nothing is worse than only having a few book choice on a particular topic and they all are bad. That's definitely not the case here.

My only complaint about the book is that all of the code is extremely short. While I'm not in favor of a book having 5 pages of listing in a row like many do, I wanted to see what a full Ruby program looked like. I couldn't find an example like I wanted.

Except for that one minor problem, this book is excellent. If you want to look at Ruby, this book would be a wonderful starting point.