Ruby Cookbook - O'Reilly's Latest Release

For Immediate Release
For more information, a review copy, cover art, or an interview with
the authors, contact:
Kathryn Barrett (707) 827-7094 or kathrynb@oreilly.com 

Make Much of Time and Hone Your Ruby Skills While Doing So
O'Reilly Releases "Ruby Cookbook"

Sebastopol, CA--Time may be money, but it's also a piece of one's life,
and a pretty significant piece at that. In some part, this explains the
popularity of the Ruby programming language, which is known for being a
wonderful timesaving tool. As Lucas Carlson and Leonard Richardson,
authors of the new "Ruby Cookbook" (O'Reilly, US $49.99) observe, "Ruby
makes you more productive than other programming languages because you
spend more time making the computer do what you want, and less wrestling
with the language." 

But even Ruby programmers can spend time without accomplishing anything:
writing Ruby implementations of common algorithms, debugging Ruby
implementations of common algorithms, discovering and working around
Ruby-specific pitfalls, working on repetitive tasks that could be
automated, searching for a library that does X, and then evaluating and
deciding between the many libraries that do X. The list goes on and on.
"Our lives are better spent creating new things than fighting our own
errors or trying to solve problems that have already been solved," Carlson
and Richardson remind us. Their contribution to the cause is the "Ruby
Cookbook." 

The "Ruby Cookbook" presents hundreds of recipes that programmers can use
to save time, sharpen their skills, and master the language.  If they need
a web application, they'll find recipes that show them how to get started
with Rails. If they need to rename thousands of files, they'll see how to
use Ruby for doing that and thousands of other everyday tasks. 

"Ruby is booming, and it's mostly because of Ruby on Rails," says
Richardson. But he adds that a lot of people are picking up Rails without
knowing much about Ruby, or dynamic languages in general, which can be a
hindrance to their growth in the long run. "These people can function as
Ruby programmers, but they lack a bottom-up grasp of its syntax, usage,
and philosophy. This book can gradually build that knowledge in the
context of solving specific common Ruby and Rails problems.

"As these Ruby/Rails programmers become more confident, they'll be more
interested in the domain-specific tasks covered in the Cookbook, like XML
processing and web services," he adds. "And people who use Ruby as a
general-purpose language can use the whole book as a reference, including
topics like GUIs and distributed programming which are far removed from
Rails."

The "Ruby Cookbook" is intended for all Ruby programmers, especially those
new to Ruby and those who have trouble with Ruby's most powerful features,
like code blocks (closures) and metaprogramming.  For more experienced
programmers, the book serves as a problem-oriented reference and a way to
expand the horizons of what they can do with Ruby. Finally, for people who
know several programming languages and are interested in learning Ruby,
this book can serve as an immersion course.

"Learning from a cookbook means performing the recipes," Carlson and
Richardson remind their readers. "Some of our recipes define big chunks of
Ruby code that you can simply plop into your program and use without
understanding them.  But most of the recipes demonstrates techniques and
the best way to learn a technique is to practice it."

To the authors, the book is an ambitious and wide-ranging project. To
programmers, it may be the most valuable book yet written about Ruby.  

Yukiro (Matz) Matsumoto, the creator of Ruby, says, "Programmers don't
live by language syntax alone, but by every line of concrete code they
write. To that end, this book is filled with practical recipes, tips,
knowledge and wisdom. I hope it leads readers to the next step of Ruby
programming."

Additional Resources:

For more information about the book, including author bios, see:
http://www.oreilly.com/catalog/rubyckbk/index.html

For a cover graphic in JPEG format, go to:
http://www.oreilly.com/catalog/rubyckbk/cover.html

Ruby Cookbook
Lucas Carlson and Leonard Richardson
ISBN: 0-596-52369-6, 873 pages, $49.99 US, $64.99 CA
order@oreilly.com
1-800-998-9938
1-707-827-7000
http://www.oreilly.com
1005 Gravenstein Highway North
Sebastopol, CA 95472

About O'Reilly
O'Reilly Media spreads the knowledge of innovators through its books,
online services, magazines, and conferences. Since 1978, O'Reilly has been
a chronicler and catalyst of leading-edge  development, homing in on the
technology trends that really matter and spurring their adoption by
amplifying "faint signals" from the alpha geeks who are creating the
future. An active participant in the technology community, the company has
a long history of advocacy, meme-making, and evangelism.

# # #

O'Reilly is a registered trademark of O'Reilly Media, Inc. All other
trademarks are property of their respective owners.