It is easy and understandable in the first nine chapter and getting so much harder after.

First book I read on programming.

Actually good exercises, but the author's self-amused, reference-HEAVY tone distracts from or even muddles the concepts he is presenting. This often makes concepts presented harder to understand than they otherwise would be. I get that the author is trying to be supportive of new programmers, but I don't need more jokes to understand something, I need more clear English. This stylistic problem increases exponentially with the complexity of the concept presented with the effect that by the end of the book, I was wading through paragraphs to sift out the one or two useful sentences from a heap of nonsense.

That said, I think the author is actually a lovely person that I would get along with smashingly in real life—I simply never want to read one of his programming books again. Two stars for having good exercises and basic and advanced solutions to each of them!

Short and simple for most of it, but was pretty lost by the end.

Great quick intro to Rails. The book focusses on the ruby fundamentals and does a great job with that!

Good introduction to programming, very humorous

Great book for anyone who wants to learn how to program.

This book got me into programming and will always be a little special to me. Thank you Chris Pine. Ruby's a beautiful language and I wish to go back to it one day.