I own both of those books as bound bushes. I get the impression that you can only buy used copies on Amazon, so sometimes the prices are... off. It looks like currently Build Awesome Command Line Apps in Ruby 2 is ~$22. However the Text Processing in Ruby is a bit more expensive, around ~$80.
Make sure you get version 2
of the command line apps book.
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It's sad to see that Amazon offers it at a cheaper price.
24.95
I think I get where you're coming from. This isn't unusual. This Twitter thread is relevant, I think: https://twitter.com/zverok/status/1365014133180141578
One of the takeaways from that thread was that Rails is a "template", so to speak. Rails does so much of the design pattern heavy lifting, that it can be very disorienting to move to an environment like shell scripting and have literally nothing to go on. How should I structure my application? Where do I start?
The meaning of "scripting" varies a lot. For example, I often start with this simple template. It's just a simple wrapper around a single class that provides some boiler plate for parsing options and some bullshit utility classes that I slapped together and toss around at-will. It's not "good software", but I use it all the time.
If you're interested in taking things further, maybe have a look at Build Awesome Command-Line Applications in Ruby 2. If you're not ready to buy a book, check out the Ruby TTY Toolkit page.
Hey! I'm sorry this slipped through. My main bookshelf is in my covid locked-down office, and I haven't been there in a long time -- forgot to get back!
Here are my favorite/most influential books that you don't seen talked about:
.rb
extension, and poof. You have a bin. I've made a lot of complex_command | slack_notify
type cli tools because of this book. It teaches you good cli hygene (make it discoverable, and make nice default things).rails new
and rails g scaffold
is so stupid fast and easy, that while it seems like overkill to build a web app for data viz-- why not? He also talks about strategies for bulk loading data into your db once you've got the table set up, something ActiveRecord has been notoriously terrible at by default (until 6 I think?).I also have all the other books you always see. POODR, Well Grounded Rubyist, Design Patterns in Ruby, etc. etc. But they are all either well recommended already, or just kind of "learn technical stuff about Ruby". The books above are all very practical -- and I think that's what I like most. They teach you some cool skills that you end up making a part of your workflow.
Here's a link to my full library: https://www.goodreads.com/review/list/119901338-tim-tilberg?per_page=100&shelf=my-books&utf8=✓&view=table