Flexible Rails: Flex 3 on Rails 2 Review

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Flexible Rails: Flex 3 on Rails 2 ReviewI started reading this book back in its beta form, continuing with it until its current release. Flexible Rails evolved into a great book.
I came across Flexible Rails when I was evaluating using Flex for my company's flagship application GUI. Rails was already the back-end of choice, but I wasn't quite sure about the complexity of integrating that with a Flex client. This book helped show me that Flex and Rails could be developed together effectively.
Some of the highlights of Flexible Rails for me are:
- The book provides a non-trivial example application to build upon throughout the book.
- The book highlights real software development life-cycle steps to pull together the examples.
- The book puts all of the examples in context.
- The book covers REST.
- The book covers using RubyAMF.
- The book covers using the Cairngorm micro-architecture.
- The book covers the basics of turning the example application into an Adobe AIR application.
- The book has useful explanations of using FlexBuilder, Subversion, and other software development tools.
Overall, the book has an entertaining and very readable style. Flexible Rails created a standard to which I hold other technical books. You definitely get your money's worth.Flexible Rails: Flex 3 on Rails 2 Overview

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Methods in Medical Informatics: Fundamentals of Healthcare Programming in Perl, Python, and Ruby (Chapman & Hall/CRC Mathematical & Computational Biology) Review

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Methods in Medical Informatics: Fundamentals of Healthcare Programming in Perl, Python, and Ruby (Chapman & Hall/CRC Mathematical & Computational Biology) ReviewThis review can also be found in the Journal of Pathology Informatics ([...]), an open access journal for the field of Pathology Informatics.
As subspecialty board certification in clinical informatics has finally become a reality, Jules Berman's book Methods in Medical Informatics could not be more timely. This well-written and informative text combines Dr. Berman's expertise in programming with his vast knowledge of publicly available data sets and everyday healthcare programming needs to result in a book which should, in the opinion of this reviewer, become a staple in health informatics education programs as well as a standard addition to the personal libraries of informaticists.
The book's title does not do justice to the wealth of information contained therein. While Python, Perl, and Ruby are certainly important components of the text as described below, the contents also house a huge amount of valuable information on publicly available data sets and how they can be accessed and used for medical discovery. Through parallel examples in Python, Perl, and Ruby, the reader is taken through sets of structured exercises, each of which includes a description of the problem or task, a human readable explanation of the script algorithm, script examples and analysis of the expected results. While this book was not intended for the novice programmer, the organization and structure of its content and explanation of the process behind the code easily facilitate a reader's ability to use the examples on his or her own computer with a minimum of background in each of the languages provided.
During the process of reviewing this book, the reviewer (who had never previously used any of these programming languages and who is a relative novice to code-writing) used the author's instructions to install the Python compiler. After some additional background reading in Python and its code construct from another source, several of the exercises in the book were tested using Python as the language of choice. As expected in any book containing programming code, versions of the programming languages used when writing a book are sometimes not the most recent stable version available for download by the reader at a later date. This appears to be more of an issue with open source programming languages because they are updated more frequently. The stable versions of Python available for download at the time of review were 2.7.2 and 3.2.2 (Perl is on version 5.14.2; Ruby is on version 1.9.2). The version of Python used in the book is 2.5 (Perl 5.8; Ruby 1.8). An example of a difference between these two versions of Python is a slightly change to the syntax for print statements, which led to some initial stalls in getting the examples to run correctly. However, this was a minor setback which was easily overcome and did not detract from rest of the book.
The book is split into four major parts and is supplemented by an epilogue and appendices. Part I on fundamental methods and algorithms covers basic computing functions such as string and image manipulation, including hash creation and text indexing. Part II on medical data resources walks the reader through a vast array of useful and publicly available data resources for research and discovery. These include but are not limited to the National Library of Medicine's Medical Subject Headings (MeSH), the Cancer Surveillance Epidemiology and End Results (SEER) Program, Online Mendelian Inheritance in Man (OMIM), PubMed, United States census files, Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) data sets and others. The reader is also introduced into an author-developed taxonomy of neoplasms. In Part III on primary tasks (i.e. fundamental scripts) for medical informatics, basic concept-indexing, scrubbing of patient identifiers from text reports, web page construction and common gateway interfaces are demonstrated as well as image annotation and use of extensible markup language (XML) and resource description framework (RDF) files. Part IV on medical discovery uses case studies to illustrate how these powerful programming techniques can enable researchers to discover information from publicly available data sets. Examples include extracting emphysema rates from CDC data, cancer epidemiological data from the SEER database and others.
The epilogue offers sage advice on how to successfully get involved in programming and informatics as a career, and the appendices have complete instructions on how to acquire all of the programming applications used in the book as well as publicly available data sets. Additional information on other publicly available files, data sets and utilities that were not covered in the examples are also included.
In conclusion, this book is for anyone who wants to learn more about medical informatics. The book contains beautifully simple examples of how to use publicly available programming languages to get a job done, and in addition opens the door to a host of incredibly useful data sets to many who may not have been aware of their existence. Both medical professionals with only peripheral knowledge of programming and nonmedical information technology professionals will find this book useful, and its structure is ideal for biomedical informatics classrooms and clinical informatics fellowships alike.
Alexis Carter, MD
Director of Pathology Informatics
Emory University
Atlanta, GAMethods in Medical Informatics: Fundamentals of Healthcare Programming in Perl, Python, and Ruby (Chapman & Hall/CRC Mathematical & Computational Biology) Overview

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Ruby Cookbook (Cookbooks (O'Reilly)) Review

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Ruby Cookbook (Cookbooks (O'Reilly)) ReviewI have a confession to make. Over more than twenty years as a programmer I'd never really had my head around object-oriented programming. I started out using C and then tried PHP and Perl and treated both as purely procedural languages (indeed, one Perl guru looked at my code and said "you were a C programmer weren't you"; humbling). Java, JavaScript, C++ and even Objective C had their turn at getting me to convert but none took (though I do code JavaScript under sufferance) until Ruby. A few month ago I started using Rails and became hooked on it and the underlying language. My Rails and Ruby skills have progressed in leaps and bounds. I've already had a good read of "Programming Ruby" and "Agile Web Development with Rails" and enjoyed and learnt from both.
I also have to admit to loving the O'Reilly "Cookbook" series. Several, particularly the "Perl Cookbook", have pride of place on the bookshelf closest to my computer. So the "Ruby Cookbook" by Lucas Carlson and Leonard Richardson was eagerly awaited. The "Cookbook" series are designed to provide you with a plethora of code examples to guide you in writing your own code. I'm definitely a hands-on style of learner and the Cookbook series suits my style - I can start getting my hands dirty with complex problems knowing I have help to code my way of out of the tight spots. This one covers a wide range of tasks from simple, such as walking a directory tree or manipulating text and numbers, through to more complex such as working with AJAX in Ruby on Rails. If you have't previously come across a book in this style then each chapter is broken up into a number of 'recipes' with a problem, a solution and then discussion of the solution.
This sort of book lives and dies by two criteria - the quality of the code and the usefulness of the recipe selection. "Ruby Cookbook" wins on both. The topics covered are wide and leave little, if any, part of the language unexplained. They start with data and structures such as strings and hashes before moving on to code blocks, objects, classes and modules. There is then an intriguing chapter on reflection and metaprogramming that I am still puzzling through before the book moves on to more internet based topics such as XML, HTML, web and internet services and, of course, Rails. The book then proceeds with chapters on the necessary housekeeping of development such as testing, packaging and automating tasks with Rake before finishing with extending Ruby with other languages and system administration tasks. The code is well written; clear and well commented, easily understandable by a virtual newb like me. The discussion is fairly clear, seemingly concise while allowing you to understand the code and how it might be changed for particular purposes.
I'm not going to go into more details as to the contents but instead point you to the book's page at O'Reilly which includes a link to the contents, listnig all the recipes in the book, and two example chapters; Chapter 7 on code blocks and iteration and Chapter 15 devoted to Rails. Together they will give you a good feel for the style and contents of the book.
The book is well written and well edited. I've already tried over a dozen of the recipes and haven't found a single code error, so my faith in the other 300 or so has risen considerably. The discussion that accompanies each recipe is a marvelous way of learning just that little bit more about the language. I found them quite good, though the odd one could do with further explanation if the book is to stand on its own - for example the discussion accompanying the recipe to iterate over a hash was not perfectly clear on the difference between Hash#each and Hash#each_pair.
At more than 800 pages this is a large and extensive volume, though the price may make you wince. Usually programming books this large have at least part of their size dedicated to something I refer to as pseudo-padding, some sort of reference or simple language explanation - this one has neither, all of it is devoted to the recipes.
With Ruby use, thanks in no part to the popularity of Rails, growing by leaps and bounds I'm sure this volume will be a well deserved bestseller. I give it four stars and recommend it to all but the most expert Ruby programmers. For beginners who, like me, appreciate hands on learning it is a must.Ruby Cookbook (Cookbooks (O'Reilly)) Overview

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Ruby Best Practices Review

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Ruby Best Practices ReviewOne of my favorite simple pleasures is reading a technical or instructional book where the level of complexity perfectly matches my expertise. I've been enjoying this exact experience while reading Greg Brown's new book, Ruby Best Practices.
I have been programming professionally for over three years, with the last five months doing full time Ruby on Rails development. I would label myself an intermediate Ruby user: comfortable with the basics, but with limited exposure to its more advanced topics. Lately, I have been reading more and more open source Ruby projects, and have been looking for ways to contribute back to our teriffic community.
Given my experience and goals, Ruby Best Practices was a perfect read. The book is a collection of general strategies for solving problems in Ruby, with a focus on real-world code examples. Its author is an experienced Ruby developer who also happens to be an excellent writer.
Ruby Best Practices has a number of notable strengths. First, Brown is highly pragmatic. When discussing closures, he writes "I could show some abstract examples or academically exciting functionality such as Proc#curry, but instead, I decided that I wanted to show you something I use fairly frequently." This attitude has lead to a book that is full of ideas you can actually use. It feels like the experienced guy down the hall showing you all his best stuff.
Secondly, RBP's examples are almost uniformly excellent. As contributor or creator of several popular Ruby projects (Prawn and Ruport) Brown has no lack of real-word code examples to choose from, and he does so with skill. In addition, he's not shy about trimming down the examples to leave behind just the most relevant code elements. These two factors combine to produce code listings which are indicative of real open-source programs while remaining quite comprehensible. Not only are Brown's examples excellent, but they are plentiful. Nearly every new idea he introduces is demonstrated through a case study of real (or plausibly real) code. Working through this book will definitely sharpen your code-reading skills.
Beyond simply being clear, Brown's writing is also fun to read. His enthusiasm for the subject matter is obvious: "I could stop here and move on to the next topic, but similar to when we looked into the belly of lazy.rb earlier in this chapter, I can't resist walking through and explaining some cool code." This sort enthusiasm continues throughout, and leads to a technical book that I'm tempted to call a page-turner. Making my way through the book really excited me to read and work on open-source projects.
If you're still on the fence, take a read through the sample chapter, Mastering the Dynamic Toolkit (available through O'Reilly or the book's blog). If you like what you see, don't hesitate to pick up a copy of this excellent book.Ruby Best Practices Overview

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