THE RUBY WAY, Third Edition (2015)

Foreword

Foreword to the Third Edition

Yesterday I was reading an article about geek fashion in Wired.com. According to it, wearing a Rubyconf 2012 t-shirt these days signals to people: “I work for Oracle.”

Wow. How far we’ve come in the last 10 years!

For quite some time, using Ruby set you apart from the mainstream. Now it seems we are the mainstream. And what a long, strange journey it has been to get there.

Ruby adoption took a long time by today’s standards. I read this book in 2005, and at that point, the first edition was over four years old. Ruby had just begun its second wave of adoption thanks to DHH and the start of Rails mania. It seemed like there might be a couple hundred people in the entire (English-speaking) world that used Ruby. Amazingly, at that point, the first edition of this book was already four years old. That’s how ahead of its time it was.

This new edition keeps the writing style that has made the book such a hit with experienced programmers over the years. The long first chapter covers fundamental basics of object-orientation and the Ruby language. It’s a must read for anyone new to the language. But it does so in concise, fast-moving narrative that assumes you already know how to create software.

From there, the chapters follow a distinctive pattern. A bit of backstory narrative, followed by rapid-fire bits of knowledge about the Ruby language. Snippets of example code are abundant and help to illuminate the concept under discussion. You can lift code samples verbatim into your programs. Especially once you get into the more practical applications chapters later in the book.

A brief bit of personal backstory seems appropriate. I owe a huge debt of gratitude to Hal for this book and the way that he wrote it. In 2005, I started work on a manuscript for Addison Wesley about the use of Ruby on Rails in the enterprise. It was my first attempt at authoring a book, and after penning about two chapters, I got stuck. Few people were using Ruby or Rails in the enterprise at that time and I had to remind myself that I was attempting to write non-fiction.

After discussing options with my editor, we determined that the best course of action might be to ditch the idea and start on a new one. The Rails Way was to cover the nascent Ruby on Rails framework in the style of this book. I employed terse narrative accompanying plentiful code examples. Instead of long listings, I interspersed commentary between sprinkles of code that provided just enough samples of the framework to make sense.

Like The Ruby Way, I aimed for breadth of coverage rather than depth. I wanted The Rails Way to claim permanent real estate on the desk of the serious Rails programmer. Like The Ruby Way, I wanted my book to be a default go-to reference. In contrast to other Rails books, I skipped tutorial material and ignored complete beginners.

And it was a huge success! Safe to say that without Hal’s book, my own book would not exist and my career would have taken a less successful trajectory.

But enough congratulatory retrospective! Let’s get back to the present day and the newest edition of The Ruby Way that you’re currently reading. The immensely talented André Arko joins Hal this time around. What a great team! They deliver a painstaking revision that brings the book up to date with the latest edition of our beloved Ruby language.

My personal highlights of this edition include the following:

• A whole chapter of in-depth coverage of the new Onigmo regular expression engine. I love its beautiful and concise explanations of concepts such as positive and negative lookahead and lookbehind.

• The Internationalization chapter tackles thorny issues around String encoding and Unicode normalization. Bloggers have covered the subject in spotty fashion over the years, but having it all presented in one place is invaluable.

• The Ruby and Web Applications chapter manages to squeeze a crash-course in Rack, Sinatra, and Rails into less than 30 pages.

* Want proof of André’s ingenuity? See how he cuts the load time for a real Rails app down to 500ms or less at http://andre.arko.net/2014/06/27/rails-in-05-seconds/.

I predict that this edition of The Ruby Way will be as successful as its predecessors. It gives me great joy to make it the latest addition to our Professional Ruby Series.

Obie Fernandez
September 15, 2014

Foreword to the Second Edition

In ancient China, people, especially philosophers, thought that something was hidden behind the world and every existence. It can never be told, nor explained, nor described in concrete words. They called it Tao in Chinese and Do in Japanese. If you translate it into English, it is the word forWay. It is the Do in Judo, Kendo, Karatedo, and Aikido. They are not only martial arts, but they also include a philosophy and a way of life.

Likewise, Ruby the programming language has its philosophy and way of thinking. It enlightens people to think differently. It helps programmers have more fun in their work. It is not because Ruby is from Japan but because programming is an important part of the human being (well, at least some human beings), and Ruby is designed to help people have a better life.

As always, “Tao” is difficult to describe. I feel it but have never tried to explain it in words. It’s just too difficult for me, even in Japanese, my native tongue. But a guy named Hal Fulton tried, and his first try (the first edition of this book) was pretty good. This second version of his trial to describe the Tao of Ruby becomes even better with help from many people in the Ruby community. As Ruby becomes more popular (partly due to Ruby on Rails), it becomes more important to understand the secret of programmers’ productivity. I hope this book helps you to become an efficient programmer.

Happy Hacking.

Yukihiro “Matz” Matsumoto
August 2006, Japan

Foreword to the First Edition

Shortly after I first met with computers in the early 80s, I became interested in programming languages. Since then I have been a “language geek.” I think the reason for this interest is that programming languages are ways to express human thought. They are fundamentally human-oriented.

Despite this fact, programming languages have tended to be machine-oriented. Many languages were designed for the convenience of the computer.

But as computers became more powerful and less expensive, this situation gradually changed. For example, look at structured programming. Machines do not care whether programs are structured well; they just execute them bit by bit. Structured programming is not for machines, but for humans. This is true of object-oriented programming as well.

The time for language design focusing on humans has been coming.

In 1993, I was talking with a colleague about scripting languages, about their power and future. I felt scripting to be the way future programming should be—human-oriented.

But I was not satisfied with existing languages such as Perl and Python. I wanted a language that was more powerful than Perl and more object-oriented than Python. I couldn’t find the ideal language, so I decided to make my own.

Ruby is not the simplest language, but the human soul is not simple in its natural state. It loves simplicity and complexity at the same time. It can’t handle too many complex things, nor too many simple things. It’s a matter of balance.

So to design a human-oriented language, Ruby, I followed the Principle of Least Surprise. I consider that everything that surprises me less is good. As a result, I feel a natural feeling, even a kind of joy, when programming in Ruby. And since the first release of Ruby in 1995, many programmers worldwide have agreed with me about the joy of Ruby programming.

As always I’d like to express my greatest appreciation to the people in the Ruby community. They are the heart of Ruby’s success.

I am also thankful to the author of this book, Hal E. Fulton, for declaring the Ruby Way to help people.

This book explains the philosophy behind Ruby, distilled from my brain and the Ruby community. I wonder how it can be possible for Hal to read my mind to know and reveal this secret of the Ruby Way. I have never met him face to face; I hope to meet him soon.

I hope this book and Ruby both serve to make your programming fun and happy.

Yukihiro “Matz” Matsumoto
September 2001, Japan