Practical Ruby Gems

Features

• Cover Type: Paperback with 271 pages
• Published by: Apress April 16, 2007
• Written in: English
• ISBN 10 Number: 1590598113
• ISBN 13 Number: 978-1590598115
• Book Dimensions: 9.1 x 6.8 x 0.9 inches
• Weighs: 15.2 ounces

Product Description


Practical Ruby Gems is a comprehensive guide to utilizing and creating Ruby Gemsready-made Ruby code modules that can be easily added to Ruby and Rails projects. This book is ideal for Ruby programmers as well as web developers who use Rails and wish to extend the functionality of their projects.

Youll get a prime selection of 34 of the best and most useful Gems, which makes up the core of this book. Each of these also comes complete with actual use cases and code examples that you can use immediately in your own projects. Youll learn how Ruby Gems can be used to

• Validate credit cards.
• Create graphical interfaces on multiple platforms.
• Speed up Rails applications.
• Develop lightweight web applications.
• Use ActiveRecord to make databases easy.
• Process RSS feeds.
• Prevent spam using CAPTCHA.
• Crop and scale images.
• Tap into the same caching system that runs LiveJournal.com.


And much, much more!

Youll also learn how to package and distribute your own Ruby Gems. This lets you tap into powerful mechanisms for resolving dependencies. And the book takes a detailed look at how Gems differ between operating systems, so youll be prepared whether your desktop runs OS X, Windows, or Linux. Youll also learn how you can share code more easily between projects, optionally sharing your contributions with the world!

About The Author


Berube is a Ruby developer, trainer, author, and speaker. He’s used both Ruby and Ruby on Rails for several years, starting in 2003 when he became a Ruby advocate after he wrote about the language for Dr Dobb's Journal. Prior to this he worked professionally with PHP, Perl, C++, and Visual Basic.


His professional accomplishments include creating the Ruby on Rails engine for CoolRuby.com (http://coolruby.com), a site that tracks the latest Ruby developments, and working with ThoughtBot (http://www.thoughtbot.com.) on the Rails engine that powers Sermo America's Top Doctor contest. Additionally, he has worked on several other Ruby projects, including the engine powering CyberKnowHow's BirdFluBreakingNews search engine, and he also created the Slueshi text adventure game system, a multiplayer text game engine written in Ruby.


David's journalism has been in print in over 65 countries, in magazines such as Linux Magazine, Dr Dobb's Journal, and PHP International Magazine. He's also taught college courses and spoken publicly on topics such as "MySQL and You" and "Making Money with Open Source Software."


He lives in New Hampshire and his hobbies include basketball, yo-yos, and sleep.

Reader Reviews
For those who aren't aware, ruby gems refers a way of packaging up code so it can be easily distributed for other developers to use, and a tool to help with the distributing and/or installing that code. On first glancing at this book, I wondered how you could fill a full-length book on the topic of gems. While getting the tools installed on some systems requires care, and there's space for a couple of chapters on packaging your own libraries as gems, both topics have been covered alongside other topics in numerous volumes. What I'd missed was that contents not only covers both of those topics, but also looks at 26 different gems and explains how you might use them in your projects. The coverage of setting up and using ruby gems at the start of the book, and on packaging and distributing your own gems at the end of the book are brief but cover the basics well enough. It might have been helpful had the latter included a little information on how to include other libraries that need to be compiled and managing the cross-platform issues that raises. Chances are anyone planning to do that is well capable of reverse-engineering a gem spec file to work out what's needed, but it would have added some weight and helped these chapters stand out from their equivalents in other volumes. The gems profiled cover a wide range of uses: databases, certain web services, parsing HTML, web frameworks, recurring events, PDF generation, and more. Most of them are pretty well known libraries, but few of us will have had a chance to try them all out and newcomers to the ruby community looking for some support in their projects may well find some useful tips within. For each gem there is an introduction, some basic code samples, a lengthier code sample (with commentary) and conclusion. That repetition means this isn't a book many will want to wade through in one go. I found that after a while I needed a break, and if reading the book it may be best to pick out a gem that particularly interests you, read the relevant section and then write some code of your own before moving on to another. A number of times I wondered if it would be preferable to drop some of the best known gems (there are plenty of ActiveRecord examples floating around) in favour of a little more depth. In particular it would have been interesting to see a dissection of how a few of the gems work, as a sign that anyone can contribute, to see what can be learned from techniques used, and to better understand how the gems in question can be used. Such explorations might serve to break up the text a bit, as well as providing useful insights into ruby development and perhaps broadening the appeal of the book a little. Overall, Practical Ruby Gems was a helpful read and there are a few new gems I'm going to be exploring as a result of my reading, but you may well want to take a close look before investing in a copy. You may broaden your ruby knowledge in the reading, but you're unlikely to deepen it significantly. Disclaimer: I was sent a copy of this book for review by the publisher.