Peter J. Jones, the creator of Vagrant, brings us “Effective Ruby : 48 Specific Ways To Write Better Ruby”. A book geared towards ruby programmers that are already familiar with the structure and syntax, but are looking to get more out of the language. The books covers a wide range of topics, with surprising amount of depth. The chapters are divided into small ‘items’ that can be consumed individually and stand (mostly) on their own. Each offers practical tidbits that can be applied to your own code immediately. I read the book cover-to-cover, but I it would also be suited to jumping around from item to item.

I found the chapter on Classes, Objects and Modules to be very useful in understanding how Ruby treats inheritance and method dispatching and the implications of which the reader should be aware of. Also of note, the chapter on meta-programming sheds some light on very useful techniques to avoid shooting yourself in the foot, a pretty common occurrence when meta-programming in Ruby.

I have been programming Ruby for years and I enjoyed reading the book a great deal. I learned some new tricks and re-acquainted myself with some forgotten ones as well.