Having fun and solving problems can be mutually exclusive. Even for professional programmers and system administrators who chose their career because they enjoy problem solving, there can be times when finding a solution is an exercise in the mundane. Luckily, there are tools designed to ease the pain and frustration faced by programmers and admins. Ruby is a programming language that was designed from the start to not only provide a means of solving problems, but also to be inherently intuitive and fun to use. Wicked Cool Ruby Scripts, by Steve Pugh, is a book aimed to bring to light the fact that you can use Ruby to write concise yet useful scripts that solve difficult problems.
If you’re a fan of the “Wicked Cool” books from No Starch Press, you’ll find the format of this book familiar. It’s not a hefty tome complete with syntax and “hello world” introductory lessons, rather it’s almost a recipe book of sorts, divided into sections of problems and chock full of immediately useful Ruby code. This is the “Wicked Cool” book I’ve been waiting for, because although I write PHP and shell scripts (not so much Java and Perl, other topics covered in the series), I’ve always thought Ruby was the coolest of all. Right from the start, you can tell that Steve Pugh agrees with me. His tone throughout the book is that of a friend who has something fun to share, never browbeating or lecturing. He’s not simply writing to show us that he knows how to write Ruby well, he’s really trying to help us out.
Honestly, some of the examples in Wicked Cool Ruby Scripts might leave you wondering why you’d use such a powerful language like Ruby for such seemingly simple things. What Steve Pugh tries (and succeeds!) to show us is that Ruby isn’t just for writing massive web applications, but it can also handle tasks often relegated to the ubiquitous, but cryptic Awk or shell languages. Perhaps you still wonder why you’d want to? “Just because you can doesn’t mean you should”, right? So why bother? Because Ruby is “Wicked Cool”, that’s why.
So what’s cool? How about a simple file alteration monitor to help you see what’s changed on your system? Not cool enough? How about a web based photo gallery in about 50 lines of code? Still not impressed? How about writing a Metasploit module to attack one Windows machine from another? From general purpose utilities to system security and yes, even some games, Wicked Cool Ruby Scripts has enough in it to pique the interest of just about any programmer or sysadmin. I for one am finding it hard to concentrate on this review because I want to get back to writing Ruby. If you’re a programmer waiting for a good excuse to try Ruby, or a Windows sysadmin wondering what an open source programming language can do for you, you’ll find Wicked Cool Ruby Scripts enlightening, inspiring, and of course… cool.
