The Ruby Programming Language: Everything You Need to Know

languages. It is precise and concise; where possible, the examples demonstrate not only syntax but also intended use. No silly examples of, say, arrays of stones, playing on a bad and boring stone age television programme here! And the authors are helped in that they are describing a truly fascinating language. It is object oriented through and through, has all the usual features of programming languages such as conditional statements and "for" and "while loops, but it has more, much more. The concept of an iterator is fundamental to the language; indeed, a ruby programmer soon finds himself thinking in terms of iterators, internal and external, rather than "for" loops. This is the sort of language that appeals to programmers because it's truly fun to program, and this is the best book on a programming language in existence. It's riveting! But the one big problem is, very unfortunately, that ruby is buggy. Worse, there doesn't appear to be anyone to send bug reports to; the unfortunate user is left to stew in his own juice. I've even experienced ruby executing a program differently depending on whether or not a comment line is deleted or not. Different ruby versions yield different results on the same program, and, when ruby signals a programming error and you enter the debugger, ruby's behaviour suddenly differs from that without the debugger. And when you are in the debugger, and the error is at line 12345, and you are at line 10, which is a loop consisting 1,000 iterations, you try to skip the loop, but then you never regain control before the error. So you sit there and single step through the loop, solely so that you can still follow the execution once the loop has terminated. Unless these bugs are removed, or even reported so that somebody can look into them, the ruby language and with it this book cannot be recommended to anybody except the masochistic.

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