Who This Book Is For

You’ll gain a lot from this book if you are...

• Interested in finding out about the benefits of writing apps using dRuby

• Excited by the concept of “distributed systems” such as NoSQL but think most of the existing systems are too complicated

• Interested in client-server network programming and web programming but are interested in a more lightweight alternative to Ruby on Rails or Sinatra

• Interested in adding concurrent programming, such as multithreading, messaging, and the Actor model, to your applications

You don’t need to know much about distributed systems as a prerequisite for reading this book, but you should know the basic Ruby syntax, know the standard Ruby classes, and be able to write some simple code.

More important, you don’t need big infrastructure to apply what you will learn in this book. I created most of the libraries to solve problems I was having. Because many personal computers come with multicore processors these days, everyone can benefit from multiprocessing libraries such as dRuby. dRuby and my other libraries will give you some basic constructs to build tools that will make your personal computing environment flexible and powerful. After reading this book, you’ll be ready to start making your own distributed tools.