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Ruby Developers Guide Review by Michael A. Thomas
Pretty Good Content. Poor Editing and Presentation.
I'm not sure how this book has achieved so many stars from previous reviewers. While the content is decent and wide-ranging (if you can get past the editing), the presentation overshadows it in a negative way. The editors and designers of the book managed to do a couple of things that really, REALLY annoy me in technical books:
Poor editing. There's little economy in the writing, which is annoying. The author(s) probably don't have English as their first language, and it shows in the end result. That's not the authors' fault - it's the editor's (if there *was* one). Sloppy editing is (IMO) the sign of a "let's just make some $$ off the 'hot' ruby language" attitude.
The examples stretch over many pages in some cases, in large part because they are presented in a font that is too large, and is double-spaced. That's just stupid: it makes the code hard to read, and whether or not it was intended, it has the appearance of just fattening up the book to take up more shelf space (yes, publishers do this - the cheesier they are, the more likely they are to do it).
The book didn't inspire me to try any of the stuff that was presented. Honestly, I think I might have been better off just scouring the net for example uses of Ruby's extensive libraries and add-ons.