Book Reviews
February 14, 2010

Refactoring in Ruby
- Author: William C. Wake and Kevin Rutherford
- Reviewer: Nola Stowe
This is more like a “workbook” then a “how to write awesome code” book. You can download the code from github http://github.com/kevinrutherford/rrwb-code and you will find tests/specs for the exercises.
The book is arranged in three parts, The Art of Refactoring, Code Smells, and Programs to Refactor.
October 16, 2009

Design Patterns in Ruby
- Author: Russ Olsen
- Publisher: Addison-Wesley Professional Ruby Series
- ISBN 10: 0321490452
- ISBN-13: 9780321490452
- Reviewer: Edwin W. Meyer
A “design pattern” is a general schema for coupling two or more code modules according to best practices that is widely applicable to many types of software systems. Design patterns were first popularized in the 1995 best seller Design Patterns: Elements of Reusable Object-Oriented Software, a collaboration of four authors informally known as the “Gang of Four” (GoF). Design Patterns in Ruby by Russ Olsen presents 14 of the 23 design patterns originally described by GoF (plus 3 new patterns) as adapted to the Ruby language. A valuable bonus is his review of some important features of the language.
April 30, 2009

Enterprise Recipes with Ruby and Rails
- Author: Maik Schmidt
- Publisher: Pragmatic Bookshelf 2008
- ISBN 10: 1-934-35623-9
- Reviewer: Edwin Meyer
Every “recipe” book of necessity is a tactical rather than strategic book, and this is no exception. Maik Schmidt provides a ground level view with competent how-to descriptions of a lot of different techniques.
April 30, 2009

Enterprise Rails
- Author: Dan Chak
- Publisher: O’Reilly Media 2009, 325 pages
- ISBN 10: 0-596-51520-0
- ISBN 13: 9780596515201
- Reviewer: Edwin Meyer
This is the book that I consider to be the true “enterprise” Rails book. It concentrates almost exclusively on topics that are essential to a successful implementation of a Ruby on Rails application in a complex computing environment.
March 23, 2009
Flexible Rails
Flex on Rails
- Authors: Tony Hillerson and Daniel Wanja
- ISBN-10: 0321574303
- ISBN-13: 9780321574305
- Reviewer (both books): Edwin W. Meyer
You’re using Ruby on Rails for rapid web application development, and you’re struggling to get JavaScript to display properly on different browsers. Surely there must be something for dynamic client side presentations that matches the ease of Rails development. Well, there is, and even better, it integrates nicely with Rails. It’s called Flex, and it is a part of the now ubiquitous Adobe Flash player.