Book Note: The Ruby Way

I've already finished this book, so I'll just do more of a final review than a series of notes while reading. This is basically a cookbook aimed at an intermediate Ruby programmer who wants to see the most elegant way to accomplish both standard and fairly advanced techniques. Even so the first chapter is a superb review of the basic language features. I'd recommend it for any experienced programmer who wants an overview of Ruby's syntax and OOP capabilities. The rest of the book is well written, but has too much of a systems programming focus and too little information on application development for me. Hal Fulton's background as a CS professor certainly comes through. For example, there are 30 pages on threaded programming and 3 pages on using MySQL. The idea of controlling multiple threads is cool, but I'd ever do it. I could just launch multiple instances of the interpreter, or more likely use mod_ruby and let Apache deal with multiple threads. In the end, other than the first chapter review of Ruby syntax I found little of use to me, but anyone building a Ruby IDE in Ruby will certainly be pleased.