This book is pretty darn good and somehow gets right into details while keeping it very accessible. Note that I'm a professional programmer so many things are obvious to me. However, it may be fine for a newbie too as it's fairly "gentle".

I really like that in the section on Strings he shows the difference in what happens in memory between + and << for concatenation (joining two strings). The later does NOT create an additional object in memory. He slips this kind of detail into the book while still keeping the reader from getting confused IMO. Nice intro book with just a bit more content and details than you'd hope for! Cool!

Note that if you're a hardcore "go straight to the most authoritative book" type of person you may not like this. You know who you are ;) I'm more of the type that gets through a couple tutorials and then gets the most authoritative reference next.

The Ruby Visual QuickStart Guide is a great introduction to the Ruby programming language. It is well written, the examples are well thought out, and the chapters are well organized. The explanations are simple enough for beginners to grasp, and yet the author never talks down to the reader.

I believe that the book would make a great text book for a beginning programming course. It would also be appropriate for intermediate level Ruby programmers who are looking to review many of the important concepts in Ruby.

I highly recommend this book.