Ruby Developer's Guide

Ruby astounds developers with its ability to make programming fun again. It frees programmers to concentrate on programming objectives, and creates fewer obstacles than other languages by flowing ideas directly into the code. Although Ruby is experiencing dramatic growth, there are very few educational resources available for aspiring developers. Written by a team of Ruby gurus, Ruby Developer’s Guide is the most comprehensive book available for serious Ruby developers.

• Review the Basics of a Ruby Installation: Learn about the ins-and-outs of installing Ruby on UNIX and Windows, as well as about the Ruby integrated Development Environment (IDE).
• Evaluate GUI Toolkits: Find out which toolkits are thread-safe, which come with good example programs, and which are the best choices for certain functions.
• Read and Write Comma-Separated Value Files: See how to use Nakamura Hiroshi’s CSV module to read and write Comma Separated Value files from within Ruby.
• Parse and Create XML in Ruby: Learn about the parsers for Ruby that work either directly with XML or with one of the various XML APIs.
• Develop Distributed Web Services: Use drb to transparently call the methods of remote objects simply by doing a method call and also to speed up CGI scripts.
• Connect to the Web with Ruby: See how Ruby can be used to provide Web content and dynamic interaction to Web clients.
• Learn to Program Graphics Using Ruby: Find support of popular graphics libraries, including Open GL, GD, GD::Graph, PGPilot, and lmib2earn.
• Improve Performance by Profiling: Use the standard profiler profile.rb or RbProf, which is faster than the standard profiler.

About the Authors

Robert Feldt is a Software Engineering Researcher at Chalmers University of Technology in Gothenburg, Sweden. His professional interest is in how to produce robust, reliable software. Robert's research focuses on what can be learned from applying the complex but robust systems found in nature to tools and methods for developing and testing software. Robert also teaches courses on software engineering to students in the Computer Science and Computer Engineering programs at Chalmers University.

Robert holds a master's degree from Chalmers University and is a member of the IEEE. He has previously worked as a consultant software engineer. He programs mostly in C, Haskell, and Ruby and uses Ruby frequently in his research since its dynamic nature allows him to easily test new ideas. He is working on a number of larger Ruby projects, including the Rockit compiler construction toolkit and the RubyVM project, to build a set of plug-and-play components for assembling Ruby virtual machines.

Lyle Johnson is a Software Team Leader at ResGen, Invitrogen Corporation in Huntsville, AL. Prior to his employment at ResGen, Lyle served as Group Leader for Graphical User Interface Development at CFD Research Corporation. Lyle has worked primarily in commercial software development for computational fluid dynamics and bioinformatics applications, but has also managed and contributed to a number of open-source software projects.

Michael Neumann is a Database and Software Developer for Merlin.zwo InfoDesign GmbH in Germany (near Stuttgart). He is also studying computer science at the University of Karlsruhe. Merlin.zwo develops large-scale database applications based on Oracle products. With more than 10 years of experience in software development, Michael has specialized in many different domains, from system-near programming, administration of Unix systems, and database development with several RDBMSs, to OOA/OOD techniques, and design and implementation of distributed and parallel applications. One of his greatest interests lies is the design principles of programming languages. Before he was employed at Merlin.zwo, he was a Database/Web Developer and Principal of Page-Store.