I’ve been slowly reading the Design Patterns in Ruby: Rough Cuts on Safari and have been finding it a pretty good read so far. I have to admit I’ve slept through the original Gang of Four Design Patterns book since it looked so excruciatingly boring and I wasn’t really convinced I needed such patterns for most of my boring run of the mill scripts. (Sure sure, crucify me now)
The book is roughly broken into
* A quick quick intro to Ruby (thank the heavens he made this short since I am getting sick of reading so many of these Ruby intros)
* The traditional Design patterns and how they would look like in Ruby
* Design Patterns suited for Ruby
I’m still reading through the traditional Design Patterns section but am enjoying how the author shows a small implementation with a pretty good example then goes on to refine it and point out how some features of Ruby make certain pieces of the implementation irrelevant or could be shortened. He also spends time explaining common gotchas and emphasizing the use cases for the particular pattern.
I can definitely see this occupying a place on my bookshelf as a nice reference guide for Ruby. It’s getting nice seeing more books that cater to people who aren’t complete Ruby newbies (while that market is important too, don’t forget the journeymen if you want to sustain a community). I’ll add more as I read through more of it but even as a Rough Cut it has been an enjoyable read so far.
