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!

Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #439826 in Books
• Published on: 2007-04-16
• Original language: English
• Number of items: 1
• Binding: Paperback
• 271 pages

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.

Customer Reviews

Fundamentals of Gems, and a guided tour of what's available
Practical Ruby Gems does exactly what it says on the tin. The first few chapters cover what gems are, how to install them and manage versions. The final chapters cover how to create and distribute your own gems.

Sandwiched between these fundamentals are a slew of concrete examples with code, covering topics like html parsing (hpricot) and RSS parsing (feedtools), zip and pdf manipulation, as well as topics more familiar to Rails people, such as the use of mongrel, rake, and ActiveRecord.

My first impression was that info on specific gems could easily be found by checking their documentation online.

However, after reading more, I realised I had missed the point. In theory, you could get this stuff online, but in practice, the often poor online documentation can't replace clear explanations and concrete code examples. This book fills you in on the fundamentals, then gives an interesting tour of some of the major gems available, with ready to use code. By bringing this all together, it will almost definitely spark some ideas on how to use gems to improve your Ruby code or your Rails apps.

Great for expanding the power of ruby
I'm learning Ruby and building Rails applications. This book offers a valuable overview of some of the Gems available for expanding the power of Ruby, including detailed descriptions of a selection of popular Gems. Things like online image manipulation and PDF creation are possible to easily implement with some of the Ruby Gems described in this book.

Essentially good, but plagued by errors and suffers from aging
This book contains three parts:

Part 1 deals with what gems are, how to install them and do version control.
Part 2, the biggest part of the book, contains chapters that deal with different Gems. All of them contain a description and one or two practical examples on how to use the Gems to get something done. All code is explained after that. The book focuses mostly on Gems that can be used in a web development or sysadmin context.
Part 3 is about creating and distributing Gems yourself.

I think the book is a nice read for starters who finished reading their first Ruby book and now want to create something useful. But I think it can be informative for more experienced Rubyists as well. It's pretty well written but I found that a few code listings contain flaws. This is mostly because the Gems used have been renamed, made obsolete by different gems or had other adjustments. So it's mostly due to the books age (April 2007) and some specifics of my operating system (Ubuntu). The publisher has not posted any errata and the downloadable code is flawed as well (at least on my system). This was a bit disappointing, but my opinion is that it's still a valuable book that will save you time in the long run. I bought the book second hand for 10 euro's so I'm pretty positive about purchasing it. But I think I would not spend the full price on the new book, but rather wait a possibly second edition or a good discount offer.

http://geekatlarge.blogspot.com/2009/05/books-anyone.html