# Practical Ruby Gems review **URL:** \ **Category:** Ruby\ **Created:** [June 19, 2007, 1:38am UTC](https://www.ruby-forum.com/t/practical-ruby-gems-review/107195 "2007-06-19T01:38:09Z")\ **Posts on this page:** 5\ **Page:** 1
**Author:** ![timhunter](https://www.ruby-forum.com/letter_avatar_proxy/v4/letter/t/71e660/32.png) [@timhunter](https://www.ruby-forum.com/u/timhunter)\ **Post date:** [June 19, 2007, 1:38am UTC](https://www.ruby-forum.com/t/practical-ruby-gems-review/107195/1 "2007-06-19T01:38:09Z")
After waiting in the Slashdot pending queue for over a month (!), my review of David Berube’s _Practical\_Ruby\_Gems_ finally made it to the front page: [Practical Ruby Gems - Slashdot](http://books.slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=07/06/18/1623249). ---
**Author:** ![timhunter](https://www.ruby-forum.com/letter_avatar_proxy/v4/letter/t/71e660/32.png) [@timhunter](https://www.ruby-forum.com/u/timhunter)\ **Post date:** [June 19, 2007, 3:55pm UTC](https://www.ruby-forum.com/t/practical-ruby-gems-review/107195/2 "2007-06-19T15:55:52Z")
On Jun 18, 5:37 pm, Tim H. [removed\_email\_address@domain.invalid](mailto:removed_email_address@domain.invalid) wrote: > After waiting in the Slashdot pending queue for over a month (!), my > review of David Berube’s _Practical\_Ruby\_Gems_ finally made it to the > front page:[Practical Ruby Gems - Slashdot](http://books.slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=07/06/18/1623249). Congratulations. How did you feel about the choice of gems? Was it a good list? Was it missing some really important gems? Was there a theme to the choices? (Most veteran? Most interesting? Randomly chosen?) ---
**Author:** ![timhunter](https://www.ruby-forum.com/letter_avatar_proxy/v4/letter/t/71e660/32.png) [@timhunter](https://www.ruby-forum.com/u/timhunter)\ **Post date:** [June 20, 2007, 1:00am UTC](https://www.ruby-forum.com/t/practical-ruby-gems-review/107195/3 "2007-06-20T01:00:08Z")
> How did you feel about the choice of gems? Was it a good list? Was it > missing some really important gems? Was there a theme to the choices? > (Most veteran? Most interesting? Randomly chosen?) I’ve paged through this a bunch of times, doing the “no I won’t buy it well maybe I will” thing in the bookstore. Bits of it seem pretty basic, but the review mentions some kind of natural-language stuff that seems pretty nifty. – Giles B. Blog: [http://gilesbowkett.blogspot.com](http://gilesbowkett.blogspot.com) Portfolio: [http://www.gilesgoatboy.org](http://www.gilesgoatboy.org) ---
**Author:** ![timhunter](https://www.ruby-forum.com/letter_avatar_proxy/v4/letter/t/71e660/32.png) [@timhunter](https://www.ruby-forum.com/u/timhunter)\ **Post date:** [June 20, 2007, 1:23am UTC](https://www.ruby-forum.com/t/practical-ruby-gems-review/107195/4 "2007-06-20T01:23:09Z")
Phrogz wrote: > missing some really important gems? Was there a theme to the choices? > (Most veteran? Most interesting? Randomly chosen?) Yes, I thought the choice was good. The list includes rake, mongrel, pdf-writer, Camping, hpricot, and markaby. You’ve gotta figure that any gem in that company is pretty good. Not every gem is “big,” like Rails. Some are small, like linguistics. You can get the full table of contents from the Apress web site: [http://www.apress.com/book/supplementDownload.html?bID=10261&sID=4231](http://www.apress.com/book/supplementDownload.html?bID=10261&sID=4231). David and I corresponded by email and he said I could quote him, so here’s what he told me about how he made his choices: “As far as deciding which gems, …I tried to look at things that had practical applications - as well as things where I could give it an interesting angle. Above all, I tried to cover different material in a different way - I wanted to get people to think “wow, that’s great.” Of course, not everything was completely off the beaten path - Rails, for example, was covered, and that’ easily the most popular gem, and RMagick isn’t exactly unpopular either, but I tried to show gems which could make very difficult, less covered problems - like programatically using zip files as a container, writing PDFs, or automating SSH tasks - into easy problems…The biggest thing for me is that I wanted to make people say ‘You can do that with Ruby?’” ---
**Author:** ![timhunter](https://www.ruby-forum.com/letter_avatar_proxy/v4/letter/t/71e660/32.png) [@timhunter](https://www.ruby-forum.com/u/timhunter)\ **Post date:** [June 20, 2007, 1:28am UTC](https://www.ruby-forum.com/t/practical-ruby-gems-review/107195/5 "2007-06-20T01:28:10Z")
Giles B. wrote: > > How did you feel about the choice of gems? Was it a good list? Was it > > missing some really important gems? Was there a theme to the choices? > > (Most veteran? Most interesting? Randomly chosen?) > > I’ve paged through this a bunch of times, doing the “no I won’t buy it > well maybe I will” thing in the bookstore. Bits of it seem pretty > basic, but the review mentions some kind of natural-language stuff > that seems pretty nifty. You might be thinking about the “linguistics” gem, which isn’t even listed in the table of contents. (A lagniappe, I guess.) I thought it was pretty cool, too. It’s one of those things that I want to try to find a need for. [http://www.deveiate.org/code/Linguistics/](http://www.deveiate.org/code/Linguistics/)