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Metaprogramming Ruby (2010)

by Paolo Perrotta(Favorite Author)

4.35 of 5 Votes: 1

ISBN

1934356476 (ISBN13: 9781934356470)

languge

English

genre

Nonfiction

publisher

Pragmatic Bookshelf

review 1: Awesome book, all around. The first few chapters were fairly easy to follow, and I enjoyed some of the humorous "pair-programming" dialogue that was sprinkled into the story. While reading the book, I had a lot of Ah-ha! moments, when I finally pieces something together which I had learned from a slew of different sources, but never really integrated into a common whole. Metaprogramming Ruby does a really good job of taking knowledge that you might have picked up from a variety of different sources and showing you how it all works together to create the magic that we commonly see in Ruby programs. The last three chapters deal with dynamic attribute methods and dynamic finders in ActiveRecord - and I was quite surprised that I could grok the content of those chapters. I've ... moreattempted looking at the Rails source on my own before, but the amount of metaprogramming in its core has always stumped me; this book does a really nice job of holding your hand through the "magic" of metaprogramming so that you can dig into the ideas hidden behind the syntax: how instance_eval is simply a convenience method for opening up the eigenclass (of a class or object) or using a scope probe to execute some code in a binding. The spell book is an awesome bonus too - a single point of reference for most techniques described in the book. 5/5 - I will probably end up reading this again at some point! If you want to really improve your ruby chops, you have absolutely no excuse not to read this book (unless your name is Chad Fowler).
review 2: It's an impressive book that can turn an advanced programming topic like metaprogramming--which is often considered the black magic of programming--into something accessible and even easy. This book mostly pulled that off, but the way it did so was annoying: it's written as a stupid, contrived conversation between two programmers, as they learn metaprogramming.The bizarre thing is that the second part of this book simply dumps you into the dark depths of Rails code, though accompanied by readable explanations. Probably the best part of this book is the last 12 pages, which is a summary of some common, Ruby-specific design patterns, focusing on metaprogramming. Any Ruby programmer could easily step up their game just by skimming through those 12 pages a couple times. less

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