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!
Customer Reviews
Average Rating:
Rating: - Helpful introduction, but fairly lightweight and repetitive
For those who aren't aware, ruby gems refers a way of packaging up code so it can be easily distributed for other developers to use, and a tool to help with the distributing and/or installing that code.
On first glancing at this book, I wondered how you could fill a full-length book on the topic of gems. While getting the tools installed on some systems requires care, and there's space for a couple of chapters on packaging your own libraries as gems, both topics have been covered alongside ... Read More
Rating: - Good book, if you have a need for it
Some books are more tutorial in nature, some more reference. This one is *really* reference, so much so that if you don't need to use the covered gems, there's no reason to buy the book.
I agree with one reviewer about much online documentation being lacking (to put it mildly), so this book is definitely helpful in that respect. Still, I found the explanations to be on the terse side. (Which some people might prefer.)
Rating: - 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.
Rating: - Practical and clear
Ruby has risen meteorically in prominence in the past few years, and the number of Ruby books has gone from a couple to a couple dozen. I'm pleased to say that this is one of the books that will remain on my bookshelf. Practical Ruby Gems makes few assumptions about the reader's level of knowledge and delivers a brief install-configure-manage tutorial to get novice readers up to speed. The main bulk of the book is 29 short chapters which each highlight a single gem, explain what it's used for, gives a simple ... Read More
Rating: - 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.
- Helpful introduction, but fairly lightweight and repetitive
- Great for expanding the power of ruby
- Practical and clear
