Mini Book Review of IronRuby Unleashed by Shay Friedman

Posted by Eric Nelson on Geeks with Blogs See other posts from Geeks with Blogs or by Eric Nelson
Published on Wed, 10 Mar 2010 12:58:11 GMT Indexed on 2010/03/11 4:40 UTC
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When I get some time (and hell starts to look a little chilly) I would love to do a more detailed review. But I wanted to get something “out there” as I really like this book and reviews of it seem a little thin on the ground.

In brief:

Is it a good book? Yes
Would I recommend this book to a .NET developer who was new to Ruby? Yes (This is me by the way)
Would I recommend this book to a Ruby developer who was new to .NET ? Yes
Would I recommend this book to a developer who sometimes does Ruby and sometimes does .NET? Yes
Would I recommend this book to a developer new to .NET and new to Ruby? Yes

The above demonstrates how well balanced this book is (IMHO).

What I like about it:

Its assumes pretty much no knowledge of IronRuby or .NET. All it asks is that you are a developer interested in IronRuby. Yet it manages to cover off the topics in a good degree of detail.
- If you are a Ruby developer you skip Part 2, if you are a .NET developer you skip some of Part 1 and whizz through the short intros to the individual technologies such as WPF.
It is definitely not a “lets makes the manual look pretty” book – this is original content thoughtfully written and presented.
It is pretty comprehensive – in 500 pages it packs in
- Intro to IronRuby
- Intro to .NET
- Intro to Ruby
- Using IronRuby with Windows Forms, ASP.NET, WPF, Silverlight etc
- Getting Rails working with IronRuby
- Unit testing with IronRuby – which I think is an excellent way for a .NET developer to start using IronRuby
- Embedding IronRuby in a .NET app - another interesting “first step” for a .NET developer

What I didn’t like:

Err… nothing yet. Ok, If I am being picky then the start of chapter 2 irked me a little as it went through the history of .NET. “The first version [of the .NET Framework] wasn’t that great”. Felt pretty good to me compared to Java and C++ development at the time :-)