The dRuby Book: Distributed and Parallel Computing with Ruby

Learn from legendary Japanese Ruby hacker Masatoshi Seki in this first English-language book on his own Distributed Ruby library. You’ll find out about distributed computing, advanced Ruby concepts and techniques, and the philosophy of the Ruby way—straight from the source.

dRuby has been part of the Ruby standard library for more than a decade, yet few know the true power of the gem. Completely written in Ruby, dRuby enables you to communicate between distributed Ruby processes as if there were no boundaries between processes. This is one of the few books that covers distributed and parallel programming for Ruby developers.

The dRuby Book has been completely updated and expanded from its Japanese version, with three new chapters written by Masatoshi-san. You’ll find out about the design concepts of the dRuby library, and walk through step-by-step tutorial examples. By building various distributed applications, you’ll master distributed programming as well as advanced Ruby techniques such as multithreading, object references, garbage collection, and security. Then you’ll graduate to advanced techniques for using dRuby with Masatoshi-san’s other libraries, such as eRuby and Rinda—the Ruby version of the Linda distributed tuplespace system. In the three new chapters, you’ll see how to integrate dRuby and eRuby, get a thorough grounding in parallel programming concepts with Rinda, and create a full text search system using Drip.

Step by step, you’ll gain mastery of dRuby and distributed computing.

What You Need:

Ruby 1.9.2 or above. All exercises were run on OS X, though it should work on any operating system. You are expected to be comfortable reading Ruby code, as we do not explain basic syntax.