Topher Cyll is a software engineer and writer living in Cambridge, Massachusetts. He received his bachelor’s degree in computer science from Williams College and works for a small Boston-area startup.

In reverse alphabetical order, he finds programming languages, music, Free Software, education, bioengineering, and beer terribly exciting.

Topher loves Ruby not only for the language itself, but also the light-hearted and intellectually curious community that surrounds it.

Want to take Ruby to the limit? Looking for new, powerful, and creative ideas that will take Ruby beyond Rails and web programming? If you’re comfortable with Ruby, you’ll be itching to go further—apply Practical Ruby Projects: Ideas for the Eclectic Programmer and become a master of advanced Ruby techniques.

Rubyist Topher Cyll brings several imaginative projects to this book, ranging from making generative music, animations, and turn–based games to implementing simulations, algorithms, and even an implementation of Lisp!

Art, music, theory, and games—this book has it all. Best of all, it’s all done with Ruby.

Each chapter, in addition to making you say “Cool—I hadn’t thought of that before,” looks at solving tricky development problems, enforces best practices, and encourages creative thinking. You’ll be building your own exciting, imaginative ruby projects in no time.

Create imaginative and innovative Ruby programming projects.

Learn how to solve tricky development problems, be guided by best practices, and be inspired to think creatively.

Don’t waste time on the basics—it’s assumed you know the fundamentals of Ruby already.

What you’ll learn

How to set up Ruby on Windows, Mac OSX, and Linux

How to create UIs with RubyCocoa

How to create a Lisp implementation in Ruby

How to create generative music and turn–based adventure games in Ruby

How to model things and create algorithms in Ruby

Several more Ruby best practices and programming techniques that will save you hours of programming time