April 2008 Archives

The Ruby Programming Language has been gratifyingly well received by readers and reviewers. In addition to glowing reviews at rubyinside.com and slashdot.org, it has been reviewed ten times at amazon.com and I proud to say that all ten reviews give it a five-star rating.

Here are the reviews. For all except the slashdot review, the linked text is the title of the review:

• The New Most Important Ruby Book [rubyinside.com]
• ...the most authoritative language book for Ruby... [slashdot.org]
• This is the new authoritative Ruby book. Buy it, not the Pickaxe. [amazon.com]
• Finally! And worth it! [amazon.com]
• A Must-Have For Serious Ruby Developers [amazon.com]
• Perfect For Experienced Ruby Developers [amazon.com]
• Great introduction to Ruby for experienced programmers [amazon.com]
• Good book on Ruby [amazon.com]
• The best Ruby book I've seen [amazon.com]
• The Ruby Book! [amazon.com]
• Great! [amazon.com]
• great book [amazon.com]

Thanks everyone!

I've put together a list of 81 errors and updates to my Ruby book. These are fixed in the next printing. If you already own a copy of the book, however, you can go through and enter the changes yourself, if you are so inclined.

I use O'Reilly's style for describing the changes. Each entry in the file begins with a page number within delimiter characters. The delimiters indicate the severity of the change:

• Page numbers in parentheses usually indicate typos or other minor non-technical changes. You can ignore these if you want.
• Page numbers in curly braces indicate minor technical errors that have been corrected
• Page numbers in square braces indicate more severe technical errors that have been corrected. There are only two of these, but they're worth noting.
• Page numbers in angle brackets are updates (this differs a bit from normal O'Reilly style) to keep the book in sync with the evolution of Ruby 1.9. In my opinion, these are the interesting ones.

I've posted my list of changes here. They will all eventually appear on O'Reilly's errata page for the book as well.

The Ruby Programming Language is going to be reprinted next week, and O'Reilly has given me SVN write access to the docbook files to fix typos, errors, etc. I've got a list of about 25 relatively minor erros that I'll be fixing, but I'd love to stomp out more bugs on this reprint.

So, if you've got a copy of the book, and have found typos, mistakes or omissions, please let me know. You can email me (david@ this domain) or post them as comments on this blog. (Normally, you'd submit them on the O'Reilly website but since time is factor for this reprint, send them directly to me, please.) Keep in mind that this is just a reprint, not a new edition of the book, so I'm pretty constrained about the kinds of changes I can make. I can't add new sections or figures or tables, or cover brand new topics that aren't currently covered. I can often squeeze in short new paragraphs when they're needed to clarify things or if there is something important that I left out.

Thanks to DH, MD, RM, and DB, all of whom submitted one or more errata to me or to O'Reilly's website recently. I don't have access to the names (or initials) of the others who submitted errata to the publisher's website back in March and February.

Update: Thanks to those (BR, CS, ADS, MD) who commented and emailed me with other errors to correct. I ended up making about 80 changes--half to fix typos and minor errors, and half to update the book to track minor (mostly) changes in Ruby 1.9. I'll post a list of all changes soon.