「Rubyらしい書き方」への傾倒が凄くて、入門書として買うには若干不適切だと思った

This book is huge and exhaustive, but it's very well organized. I went from knowing absolutely nothing about Ruby to writing useful programs for myself by the end of Chapter 4 (about 50 pages).

Ruby is a big language and I think it warrants a big book. Big human languages (like English) allow concise and elegant speech. Big programming languages allow the same. But they do take longer to learn. Fortunately, Ruby has two things going for it in this regard:

1) It borrows a lot from other languages, so the more languages you know, the quicker you'll pick up Ruby.

2) It's nicely designed and fairly consistent, so once you learn something, you can often apply it to other parts of the language.

Chapter 9 was my first big "ooooh!" moment with the language: modules and mixins. (By the way, I think "module" is a really poor choice of word for this functionality and "mixin" has always sounded silly to me. That term dates back to the Flavors object system for Lisp and was taken from the ice cream industry.) But who cares what it's called - it's simple and its pragmatic and it works. Import a module's methods into a class and now the class has those methods. I like this kind of system.

My book was the Second Edition, covering Ruby 1.8. (And yes, it's sat on my shelf since it was current, I'm embarrassed to say.) Some things had changed, but the authors did a great job of correctly predicting the changes. If you see an older copy of this for sale cheap and you want to learn Ruby, don't hesitate to buy it. It's still completely relevant in 2018.

I did actually read the entire second half of the book (the built-in class/module and standard library reference). Of course, it was slow and boring and I'm still going to have to look most of this stuff up later when I need it. However, I strongly believe there is a huge advantage to knowing something is *possible* even if you don't remember quite how to do it. In our modern era of instant reference material online, knowing *what* to look up, what it's *called* is more than half the battle.

Ruby has so much stuff built in, it's almost ridiculous (in a good way). A lot of it is very Unix-oriented (no wonder Ruby can be such a pain to install on Windows - it wants to bring an entire POSIX environment with it!). Ruby clobbers Perl in every possible category and looks good doing it. I can't believe it took me this long to join the fun!

I use Ruby almost daily now. It and this book were everything I could have (reasonably) asked for.

Weird trivia: the entire last 40+ pages starting at Appendix D, continuing through the Index and including the page of advertisements for other Pragmatic Bookshelf titles was repeated at the end of my book. The binding is clearly the correct size, so I imagine a lot of copies went out this way. Epic copy/paste mistake?

Draft

This enormous book covers most of what you want to know about Ruby, and everything you never wanted to know. Its overview of the language is decent but seems poorly organized. It jumps back-and-forth between basic and advanced. Beginners would feel lost, while more advanced programmers have to skip around carefully. But if you don't skip around too much, you'll find nuggets that explain things much better than any other Ruby book. It also covers tangential subjects that you won't find in most Ruby books--RDoc, RSpec, Shoulda, IRB, and writing C extensions. The best part of this book is the reference manual at the end. It's more thorough and organized than any other Ruby book I've seen.

The 'pickaxe,' oft-cited as the definitive guide for aspiring Ruby hackers. I'd have to agree. The edition I have was updated for the current release of Ruby and contains some gems about the inner-workings of the language that I found fascinating. Read it if you are a dyed-in-the-wool Rubyist or even a dispassionate student of computer languages. You'll no doubt find something worthwhile here.

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A very comprehensive look at Ruby and the aspects of the language people seem to enjoy. Explanations on the difference between Ruby 1.9 and previous iterations are also very thorough.

This book was the beginning of a great journey through the ruby language for me which changed my style of programming quite significantly. The writing style is clear and easy to follow whilst at the same time managing to convey a lot of information in a concise way. I wish all programming books were written this way.

This is the book that started it all for me. It's a classic. It's what I do 8 hours a day, and sometimes on the weekends (for fun).

This is the bible of ruby and a must read for any new ruby developer. I read it after working in ruby for about 4 years and still found quite a few awesome new things.

good reference material