O'Reilly has published Ruby in a Nutshell, written by Ruby's creator, Yukihiro "Matz" Matsumoto. Ruby is a language that is gaining a lot of popularity around the world. Of course, no Perl programmers like or are interested in anything that isn't Perl, so I'm sure no one will want this book, be interested in Ruby, care to read An Introduction to Ruby, or even remember this story two minutes after reading it. Right?
Re:Ahem
hfb on 2001-12-07T15:52:42
The pick axe book is an Addison-Wesley title not an O'Reilly title. Addison-Wesley has another book, The Ruby Programming Language coming out next year as well. The Ruby Way is a SAMs book of less than 1,000 pages and will be released this month. It only took 4 or 5 years to finally get noticed so I'm sure they'll have as many books as Perl by this time next year.
Re:Ahem
Matts on 2001-12-07T16:21:05
Yeah, though gnat says they don't sell well, I think eventually that will change. Ruby isn't lucky enough to have been "The glue of the web", but I think it will see good steady sales growth over the next few years, until it reaches a good level of critical mass.
It actually may be time for me to start hacking code out in Ruby, instead of just drooling over it:-)
Re:As Plugged By Gnat
Whammo on 2001-12-07T04:13:48
The Friday, October 5th, reference. "ORA"
Re:I'm a convert
the way on 2001-12-07T23:14:00
I'm interested in trying Ruby, but the thing I most love about Perl is CPAN. Is Ruby's library support good? If I want to make a pre-forking server in Perl, I use Net::Server, to talk to any server out there there's a Net::foo module for my needs, for number crunching there's PDL, for text formatting there's Text::Autoformat,... How much of this stuff is around for Ruby? Re:I'm a convert
rubyfan on 2001-12-08T03:13:06
Admittedly, Ruby's RAA is not so nearly full of modules as is Perl's CPAN. Interestingly enough, a discussion about porting Perl modules to Ruby errupted today on comp.lang.ruby. Currently, people are porting modules on an 'as needed' basis, but now it is being suggested that we go and figure out what the most popular Perl modules are and just port them over.
Maybe we should require that all new converts from Perl to Ruby bring a module with them then it wouldn't be too long before we had most of CPAN duplicated.;-)
Take a look at what's in the RAA, you might find what you need. Oh, and also check out the libraries that are distributed with Ruby, for example, the following come with the standard Ruby distribution:
Net::FTP, Net::Telnet, Net::HTTP, Net::POP,
Net::APOP, Net::POPMail, Net::SMTP, CGI,
TCPServer, Win32OLE, Win32API - just to a few...Re:I'm a convert
djberg96 on 2001-12-19T18:45:17
I actually attended the first Ruby conference down in Tampa, and the RAA is eventually going to get an overhaul (known now as RAA.succ). This was one of the main topics on the second day.We basically used CPAN & the current RAA as a starting point, but it will go beyond just look & feel. There's a need in Ruby for a consistent installation & testing mechanism for modules.
The problem now is actually getting someone to actually *implement* the suggestions.
As the above poster already mentioned, many of the popular CPAN modules are included in the base distribution or simply aren't needed (i.e the various 'tie' modules and OO interfaces to non-OO functions). Many others are already on the RAA, including what is IMO the most important one - DBI.
As for bringing a module over - I think it's a good idea. I actually had Net::Netrc ported - until my hard drive crashed. I think Ruby needs more XML and HTML parsers & generators, frankly.
Re:Perl 6 is available now: Ruby
pudge on 2001-12-19T20:32:56
Good! That makes it easier to disregard, since I don't care about Perl 6 either!:-)/2
