Re: Everyday Scripting with Ruby (the book)

Upon further review...
I finally got to the book and gave it a proper reading. 
(Although I still need to go back and do some of the
excercises)
I was inaccurate in my initial comments based on a
superficial browsing of the book a couple months back.  Mea
culpa.

The first half is a lot of review, but there are definitely
some bananas and neat tricks in there, many he points out
and others jump out at you.  He does a good job of
illustrating test-first scripting for example, he shows Ruby
short-cuts and nuances that are cool but not necessarily
obvious, etc.

The middle chapters on project organization, packaging,
building etc. are very valuable and definitely helped me see
how I could reorganize some of the projects I've done to
make them easier to mangage, enhance, and share with others.
 I look forward to using his project template utilities and
seeing what they do.

The last few chapters are really pretty cool -- I'm looking
forward to reading them again and working on the exercises
to catch everything but he hits on some slick stuff.

And although it didn't meet my initial expectations, which
as I've now learned were off-base from the book's
intentions, I found it to be a very good resource on the
craft of scripting and that it gives you a lot of tools and
concepts to apply to your test scripting projects.
  
I would recommend it to both newbies and experienced ruby
programmers, as Chris McMahon pointed out 
"Even if you know this stuff, there are surprising
little
bits that will still probably take you by surprise, unless
you are
very, very good at Ruby." (and even then I bet 

And lastly, the book has some good philosophy on scripting
and testing in general.  He provides a lot of insight from
an experienced point of view that I found helpful and
enlightening.
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