MacRuby: The Definitive Guide: Ruby and Cocoa on OS X [Paperback]

If you are:

- a Ruby developer who would like to learn Cocoa and program for the Mac

or

- a Cocoa Mac developer who would like to learn programming with Ruby

then you could do a lot worse than reading Matt Aimonetti's book. It gets exactly what's useful by focusing on programming for Mac, on the Mac, using MacRuby. So it doesn't want to teach you Ruby or Cocoa. There are other books for that. Instead it focuses on the specific stuff:

- What's different when programming in Ruby from programming in Objective-C
- How to use Mac tools, e.g. Xcode, to develop in Ruby for the Mac
- How the MacRuby runtime is using and integrates with the Objective-C runtime
- How to call Ruby code from Objective-C and back
- How to benefit from the interpreted nature of Ruby within a Cocoa app

and so on.

A very interesting look into what the future of Mac programming (and hopefully iOS). It helped me get up to speed very quickly with MacRuby (now included with OS X Lion) and saved me a *lot* of time, probably weeks. I am an inexperienced Ruby programmer, but a seasoned Cocoa programmer. I think that it would be equally useful to an experienced Ruby programmer getting started with Mac development.

Highly recommended

I already "know" MacRuby and wasn't really looking for a tutorial so much as I was looking to support the author of this book by buying a copy, but having done so, I was more than pleasantly surprised by the quality of the writing, the easy way in which topics are introduced, and the programming examples sprinkled throughout. MacRuby is only useful for developing OS X applications, so folks looking to do iOS (iPhone / iPad) apps will probably not find this book to be useful, but it's otherwise an excellent language for both rapid prototyping and deploying apps on OS X, and you couldn't have a finer introduction to the language and its unique strengths than this book!

Confession: I am a very accomplished javascript/php developer with some C and AS experience. I was looking to get into Ruby because of my increasing dislike for PHP's artificial OO abilities. My company needed some of my applications to be ported to desktop clients and away from the browser.

The Point: I was learning two languages at once, and both languages/environments have an incredibly steep learning curve. This book was a life saver. Matt's blog at merbist was a life saver. The amount of feedback I got from him on the Macruby developer forums was amazing. The guy lives and breathes for this community which I was not used to coming from the PHP vortex. :-)

I have yet to read the final version of the book. All of my reading of the book was done on the unfinished version from the site put out by O'Rielly. If the code samples were good at that point, then I am sure they are even better in the final copy. I have bought the book because of how much the book and Matt helped me. There were some minimal areas where things were not completely clear, but much of that was attributable to my lack of knowledge of either environment.

The book does a really good job of starting out simple and helping you to get things working. As things start to work you get a feel for what is possible. Matt does a nice job of getting your feet into all of the potential pools of possibility without overwhelming you. If you read this book you will have a solid foundation to go in many different directions. Ruby is an incredibly complex and expressive language and the cocoa framework is absolutely immense. Core data alone can make your head spin for days if you are used to active record or other mysql abstraction layers. The cool approach taken in this book however is to make things work so you understand the concept, and realize how much is possible. If you are looking for the esoteric intricacies of the cocoa language, this is not your book. If you want to really grasp the bridge and how ruby just seamlessly gives you access to this awesome framework with all its potential and possibilities, this is the best place to start your journey. I have reread much of the book at least four or five times and use it as a constant reference.

Well done Matt.