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Ruby Under A Microscope (2000)

by Pat Shaughnessy(Favorite Author)

4.36 of 5 Votes: 5

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English

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review 1: Ruby Under a Microscope covers advanced topics like YARV (Yet Another Ruby Virtual machine). Lots of time is spent converting ruby code into YARV code. It is great for understanding Virtual Machines but questionable on improving your ruby. It includes snippets of the C code behind MRI (Matz Ruby Interpreter). It has a chapter covering JRuby and Rubinius respectfully.It is required reading if you want a low level understanding of MRI or want a handle on the C structures it uses to write your own C-extension. It is not that helpful for improving your Ruby skills. It got me interested in Rubinius to read over the source code. I'm also curious how C-extensions are implemented for MRI, Rubinius and JRuby. The sign of a good book is it inspires in depth questions. This meets the... more mark.
review 2: The book provides a really nice insight about how Ruby works behind the scenes and how many of its cool features like blocks are implemented. The author also analyzes the Ruby MRI implementation a lot from a performance perspective and identifies the strong and weak points. Overall, you can gain a lot of transferable knowledge about how dynamic programming languages work in general. The parts I enjoyed the most were discovering the dual stack mechanism, how the concept of closures and the ruby method lookup mechanism are implemented and, of course, the last part about how garbage collection. less

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