Dave Thomas

A Police Officer's personal experience of coming out of darkness into light.

Journalists, stop playing guessing games! Inside the answers to your most pressing questions await: Videogame, one word or two? Xbox, XBox or X-box? What defines a good game review? Fitting neatly between The AP Stylebook and Wired Style, The Videogame Style Guide and Reference Manual is the ultimate resource for game journalists and the first volume to definitively catalogue the breathtaking multibillion-dollar game industry from A to Z. Includes official International Game Journalists Association rules for grammar, spelling, usage, capitalization and abbreviations, plus proven tips and guidelines for producing polished, professional prose about the world's most exciting entertainment biz. Exploring the field from yesterday's humble origins to tomorrow's hottest trends, The Videogame Style Guide and Reference Manual contains all the tools you need to realize a distinguished career in game journalism.

Ruby is an increasingly popular, fully object-oriented dynamic programming language, hailed by many practitioners as the finest and most useful language available today. When Ruby first burst onto the scene in the Western world, the Pragmatic Programmers were there with the definitive reference manual, "Programming Ruby: The Pragmatic Programmer's Guide". Now in its Second Edition, author Dave Thomas has expanded the famous Pickaxe book with over 200 pages of new content, covering all the new and improved language features of Ruby 1.8 and standard library modules. The Pickaxe contains four major sections: an acclaimed tutorial on using Ruby; the definitive reference to the language; complete documentation on all built-in classes, modules, and methods; and complete descriptions of all 98 standard libraries. If you enjoyed the First Edition, you'll appreciate the new and expanded content, including: enhanced coverage of installation, packaging, documenting Ruby source code, threading and synchronization, and enhancing Ruby's capabilities using C-language extensions. Programming for the worldwide web is easy in Ruby, with new chapters on XML/RPC, SOAP, distributed Ruby, templating systems and other web services. There's even a new chapter on unit testing. This is the definitive reference manual for Ruby, including a description of all the standard library modules, a complete reference to all built-in classes and modules (including more than 250 significant changes since the First Edition). Coverage of other features has grown tremendously, including details on how to harness the sophisticated capabilities of irb, so you can dynamically examine and experiment with your running code. "Ruby is a wonderfully powerful and useful language, and whenever I'm working with it this book is at my side" - Martin Fowler, Chief Scientist, ThoughtWorks.