--bcaec54fb9e02c631704aa09e4e1
Content-Type: text/plain; charset=ISO-8859-1

On Mon, Aug 8, 2011 at 8:42 PM, Kevin <darkintent / gmail.com> wrote:

> I'm thinking of picking up these two books and was wondering if anyone
> here had any experience with these.  If so how would you rate these
> two publications?  Do you have other preferred books that deal with
> these topics in depth?
>
> Links for those who haven't heard of them:
> http://pragprog.com/book/ager/exceptional-ruby
> http://pragprog.com/book/ppmetr/metaprogramming-ruby
>
>
I've read Metaprogramming Ruby. I'd probably give it 3.5 stars. It was good,
but didn't need to be as long as it was, and I didn't feel that the "story"
added anything (in fact, I was often annoyed by the snarky coworker). I
didn't think it did a good enough job making the object model clear (I later
went back to look at the diagrams, and couldn't really make sense of them),
but I did have several moments of clarity while reading it, and at one point
realized "oh, it's so simple".

The code examples are pretty good, and it does a good job of covering a
topic that can be confusing to the uninitiated. If you've found yourself
evaling code written in a string, after giving up on trying to do it all in
Ruby, then you are probably in a good place to learn a lot from this book.
If you don't know what a singleton class is, or don't feel comfortable with
it, then you'll probably get a lot out of this book.

There are also a set of screencasts by Dave Thomas that cover this material,
which I also enjoyed.
http://pragprog.com/screencasts/v-dtrubyom/the-ruby-object-model-and-metaprogramming

--bcaec54fb9e02c631704aa09e4e1--