This series uses example-based tutorials to explain and illustrate concepts and new lessons build upon concepts learned from previous lessons and examples. By the time you've gone through one of the books the most fundamental lessons have been iterated over numerous times (but without beating you over the head with them), and that's how these things stick. But honestly, my favorite things about these books are that they're priced to move (free & cheap, based on what format you're looking for) and that they're open-source (the source code is up on Zed's Gitorious account) but they're edited; no wild-ass Wikipedia style misinformation, just people contributing what they know where they think it'll do some good.

So like I mentioned up there, I initially grabbed the book around its second or third beta release, figuring that while it was still in the process of becoming a Real Book I sometimes feel like I'm still in the process of becoming a Real Admin so, you know, what the hell, let's work through it together.

I know a number of developers who only know Ruby in the context of the Rails framework (and maybe related Rake tasks) and this book is an exceptional guide to using Ruby for more than just Rails applications. Command-line tooling has long been an area of interest for me as working in operations means often having to perform a number of repetitive tasks which lend themselves well to being scripted; good admins write good scripts.

To that end, I think there's a philosophy behind useful scripting and I think that sticking to system tools like Bash (or if you insist, standard bourne shell) whenever possible is always your safest bet. But sometimes it's just easier or smarter (and sometimes both) to use a language like Ruby or Perl for tasks like string manipulation, data aggregation and analysis, or "glue code". I think the most important thing this book does is try to instill a general philosophy of how good shell scripts and command line tools are built and maintained.

Beyond its focus on OptionParser (the standard Ruby argv parser library), Build Awesome Command-Line Applications in Ruby also gives a high level but functional overview of some of the popular options (Trollop, David's own methadone, and main) for parsing options and building help screens for your tools. For those of you who are curious, Slop is also somewhat popular but I understand that reviewing all of the options would have unnecessarily extended the length and scope of the book; you have to draw the line somewhere.

David has written a pretty useful book and I think it's a must-read for anyone who has to roll their own tools with any regularity. If you work in operations, development, or tooling you owe it to yourself to give it a read if only for the overview of what makes a successful command line tool that people appreciate using and what makes a shitty ad-hoc script with no help screen or sanity checking that your coworkers hate using but no one wants to take the time to refactor.

CSSEdit has the most powerful and well thought-out interface I've ever seen for working with stylesheet properties, and its source-and-visual CSS editor is rightfully award-winning. If you've got to spend more than an hour a week in stylesheets, CSSEdit is the only reasonable tool for the job.

If you're more of a codemonkey, TextMate is the darling of both the Unix refugee camp that took shelter in OS X recently, as well as the Ruby and Rails development communities. It's sort of the best damned text-and-code editor ever produced for the MacOS, with the possible exception of the long-time heavyweight, BBEdit. The bundles are well structured, and support almost any language or variant you can think of.

If you're in the market for power editors, you could do worse than giving these two a spin. Of course, if you're the "all in one" sort, there is always Coda, by the boys at Panic. While it was slightly raw the last time I used it, if I hadn't already owned a license for TextMate and CSSEdit when it came out I'd have probably purchased it. It's improved considerably, and it is under steady development, but it is extremely web-centric (see the supported languages) and that might be a drawback for some people.