For more than a decade, Ruby developers have turned to The Ruby Way for reliable “how-to” guidance on effective Ruby programming. Now, Hal Fulton and André Arko have thoroughly updated this classic guide to cover new language enhancements and developers’ experiences through Ruby 2.1.

The new edition illuminates Ruby 2.1 through 400+ examples, each answering the question: “How do I do this in Ruby?” For each example, they present both a task description and realistic technical constraints. Next, they walk step-by-step through presenting one good solution, offering detailed explanations to promote deeper understanding.

Conveniently organized by topic, The Ruby Way, Third Edition makes it easier than ever to find the specific solution you want—and to write better code by reflecting Ruby’s unique philosophy and spirit.

Coverage includes

• Ruby 2.1 overview: terminology, philosophy, and basic principles
• Best practices for strings and regular expressions
• Efficiently internationalizing your code
• Performing calculations (including trigonometry, calculus, statistics, and time/date calculations)
• Working with “Rubyesque” objects such as symbols and ranges
• Using arrays, hashes, stacks, queues, trees, graphs, and other data structures
• Efficiently storing data with YAML, JSON, and SQLite3
• Leveraging object-oriented and dynamic features, from multiple constructors to program inspection
• Building GUIs with Shoes 4, Ruby/Tk, Ruby/GTK3, QtRuby, and other toolkits
• Improving thread performance by understanding Ruby’s synchronization methods and avoiding its pitfalls
• Automating system administration with Ruby
• Data formats: JSON, XML, RSS, Atom, RMagick, PDF, and more
• Testing and debugging with RSpec, Minitest, Cucumber, byebug, and pry
• Measuring Ruby program performance
• Packaging and distributing code, and managing dependencies with Bundler
• Network programming: clients, time servers, POP, SMTP, IMAP, Open-URI
• Web applications: HTTP servers, Rails, Sinatra, HTML generation, and more
• Writing distributed Ruby software with drb
• Choosing modern development tools that maximize your productivity

All source code for this book may be downloaded at www.rubyhacker.com.

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Hal Fulton has two degrees in computer science from the University of Mississippi. He taught computer science for four years at the community college level before moving to Austin, Texas, for a series of contracts (mainly at IBM Austin). He has worked for more than 15 years with various forms of UNIX, including AIX, Solaris, and Linux. He was first exposed to Ruby in 1999, and in 2001 he began work on the first edition of this book, which was the second Ruby book in the English language. He has attended six Ruby conferences and has given presentations at four of those, including the first European Ruby Conference in Karlsruhe, Germany. He currently works at Broadwing Communications, working on a large data warehouse and related telecom applications. He works daily with C++, Oracle, and of course, Ruby. Hal is still active daily on the Ruby mailing list and IRC channel, and has several Ruby projects in progress. He is a member of the ACM and the IEEE Computer Society. In his personal life, he enjoys music, reading, writing, art, and photography. He is a member of the Mars Society and is a space enthusiast who would love to go into space before he dies. He lives in Austin, Texas.

The Ruby Way, 3rd ed.