As many of you may or may not know, I was the technical editor on Shay Friedman’s book "IronRuby Unleashed". I am a huge fan of the Ruby language, and as you probably have guessed, I am also a big fan of the CLR. So when I found out that they were bringing the Ruby language over to the CLR, I was absolutely ecstatic. I spent quite a bit of time with IronRuby, leveraging it for little utilities, exploring a bit, and I even wrote up a fairly popular blog post series about using IronRuby. I was approached about the potential of writing the IronRuby Unleashed book for Sams, but I felt under qualified and way too busy to try to write an entire book on IronRuby. Now that I have the book in my hands, I can firmly say that I was definitely under qualified to write a book on IronRuby. I was amazed at Shay’s depth of knowledge on a topic which is so young, as well as his thoroughness in explaining the topic. Shay was more than qualified to write this book, and you can tell that he poured his heart and soul into it.
Synopsis
While I may be a bit biased, I have to say that the book is great. :-) Shay definitely knows his IronRuby and shows it. He manages to write a book which delves into some deep technical content, but starts off high level enough that even someone who has never used Ruby could pick up the book and learn it. The book is very well organized, and starts off with a quick introduction to Ruby, the .Net Framework, and the DLR (Dynamic Language Runtime). He then immediately goes into getting IronRuby up and running on your system, along with a reference to how to use the IronRuby executable, and even how to get IronRuby to run inside some 3rd party IDEs.
