Author Hal Fulton has updated his modern classic, The Ruby Way. The publication of the second edition, due the third week of October to coincide with RubyConf 2006, marks the launch of Addison Wesley's Professional Ruby Series. In this InfoQ exclusive excerpt, Hal answers the question which sets the tone for his entire book: What is the "Ruby Way"?
Preparing the second edition was a long and difficult effort:
First of all, Ruby has changed since version 1.6 that I was using then. It doesn't seem like much as you're watching it, but when you stop to add up all the changes in syntax, semantics, the core, and the standard libraries, it's quite a bit. Second of all, I wanted to broaden the scope a little. There were all these cool things that were not covered in the first edition, like Rinda and Ring and RMagick and RSS and YAML and many others. I wanted to cover more of these, and I did. Though, believe me, there are many others I left out for lack of time and space.
Hal has been the subject of some blogging lately. He was recently interviewed by another well-known Rubyist, and was even the source of some controversy for his suggestions about sneaking Ruby into corporate environments.
You can meet Hal in person this weekend at RubyConf, if you were lucky enough to get tickets to the sold-out event.