RubyCocoa Resources

I won a copy of this book as a door prize at the 2006 RubyConf, and as I was telling Hal when he kindly signed it for me, this was the only Ruby book I knew of that I didn’t already own. But that’s not Hal’s fault, his book was fresh off the press, and to be honest, I’d already been using his first edition for a while.

Hal has done a great job of providing an encyclopedic resource that still has a personality. His first chapter “Ruby In Review” gives an overview that would make a wonderful “Ruby in a Nutshell” book (if he happened to be writing for a different publisher). Its “Training your Intuition” section could only have been written by a veteran Ruby user.

Rather than make a feature-by-feature comparison with the other big Ruby resource, I’ll take the easy way out and suggest you do what I did and get both. It’s much easier (and cheaper) than having any of these guys fly to your office to answer questions, and like plenty of other books in this category, if you lug both around at once, you won’t have to worry about your arm muscles getting lopsided.

But for some specific topics that I’ve needed thus far:

• The coverage of Austin Ziegler’s PDF::Writer is great, it’s the best I’ve seen in print so far.

• The coverage of XML processing with REXML is sufficient, but was less than I was hoping to find.

• There is no coverage at all of Ruby on the Mac! Not all Hal’s fault, this reflects the past immaturity of RubyCocoa and the Ruby AppleScript bridge. But those things are changing fast, and Hal seems to be stuck in the low-level worlds of PC and Linux frameworks.

So buy this book and help Hal make lots of money. Hal, please use some of it to buy a Mac. You’ll be glad you switched.