Ok, so I have been teaching myself Ruby since last fall and I am in love with it.

Javascript: too wordy, too many f*%king loops and punctuation, mostly front end, can be used for some programming.

PHP: too many functions, hard to find the one you want, less wordy and loopy than javascript. Back end web programming.

Ruby: Beautiful. Elegant. Simple. Bless it. Very little punctuation, loops only where you need them and a not an overload of built in functions/methods. Back end, needs a compiler. Still beautiful.

But Ruby on Rails can be a bit troublesome, opinionated, and locked into the framework. Don't get me started on deployment. Makes PHP look downright friendly.

Good book to get you started by experts in Rails.

Wonderfully written book that really serves its purpose. As a person who wanted a quick and painless introduction to a new programming language, I can say that this book didn't disappoint.

Most impressive part of the book is the complete list of classes and libraries that are included in the latest (right now it's Ruby 2.0) version of the language.

Ruby is such an elegant language. Exhibited so, from these authors who've done a good job with introducing the it to programmers. First time programmers won't enjoy this book! But, it sure gets one up to speed with the language. It is also the only recommended book

Great intro and reference for Ruby.

This is the book I learned Ruby from, once upon a time, and while it has its detractors I still think it's a good tutorial (especially if you know some other programming language, like Java). Probably not a good choice if you've never done any programming.

"Programming Ruby: The Pragmatic Programmers' Guide, Second Edition by Dave Thomas (2004)"

Very nice introduction to a very cool programming language. I like the way the author's started out explaining the language from the point-of-view of describing a hypothetical project that they were going to implement in Ruby and stuck with that metaphor throughout the book (even in the more arcane 'Interfacing Ruby with C' sections). The last 200 pages or so is also essentially a very nice 'Ruby in a Nutshell' type reference so you get 2 books for the price of one: (a) A good tutorial on the Ruby language and (b) A nice reference to put beside your desk. Overall, a very readable book on Ruby.

Test

This is a great book to have on hand if you want to go beyond the basics of Ruby. I have not read it page to page but use it more as a reference.

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?

Programming Ruby: The Pragmatic Programmers' Guide, Second Edition by Dave Thomas (2004)

You definitely shouldn't read it like a normal book... It's more like a "reference book"