Programming Ruby

A tour de force journey through the dynamic, object-oriented language known as Ruby, with over 200 pages of new material and full descriptions of all the standard library modules. Covers strings, classes, blocks, and regular expressions with thorough examples. This book has such a reputation as the definitive reference for learning Ruby that it is simply called "The Pickaxe Book" in the programming community. There are many Ruby tutorials and references on the web, but the beauty of this book is that it is both well-written and provides a compendium of what you really need to know about Ruby that can't be easily sourced and collected. This is the ultimate book for both learning Ruby and use as a desk reference.

This book is pretty well laid out and keeps things simple, I think that might be as much a testament to the design of Ruby as to Dave's penmanship. Anyway, it is all there and easily accessible and understandable. If you are doing it with Ruby, this is the book to have. The back half is just a listing of the Ruby documentation so... you know, whatever.

This was my first foray into such a dynamic language. For a quick introduction to the language I don't think you can beat this book. After reading this book the biggest concern I have about using a language like Ruby would be the fact that it is dynamically typed. It just seems like this would lead to you not finding out you passed the wrong object to some code until you did a test run. Coming from a C background where we are taught to have the compiler check for errors like this, this is a reasonable worry. It definatly looks like a fun and productive language though. I also liked that fact that the first edition is available online at Programming Ruby.

Solid how-to and reference book. Dubbed the "Pickaxe" book by Ruby programmers because of the cover photo. Programming Ruby is how I learned Ruby, now my favorite programming language. I can't get past the author's name though. Every time I notice it on my shelf I think, "So that's what he's been up to since SCTV."

An excellent, comprehensive book on Ruby. For experienced programmers, you don't want to wade through all of the beginning programming stuff. Just tell me how the language works and define all of the constructs. This book accomplishes that. It looks to me like the Pragmatic Bookshelf as a publisher is doing top notch work!

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