The Ruby Programming Language is the authoritative guide to Ruby and provides comprehensive coverage of versions 1.8 and 1.9 of the language. It was written (and illustrated!) by an all-star team:

• David Flanagan, bestselling author of programming language "bibles" (including JavaScript: The Definitive Guide and Java in a Nutshell) and committer to the Ruby Subversion repository.

• Yukihiro "Matz" Matsumoto, creator, designer and lead developer of Ruby and author of Ruby in a Nutshell, which has been expanded and revised to become this book.

• why the lucky stiff, artist and Ruby programmer extraordinaire.

This book begins with a quick-start tutorial to the language, and then explains the language in detail from the bottom up: from lexical and syntactic structure to datatypes to expressions and statements and on through methods, blocks, lambdas, closures, classes and modules. The book also includes a long and thorough introduction to the rich API of the Ruby platform, demonstrating -- with heavily-commented example code -- Ruby's facilities for text processing, numeric manipulation, collections, input/output, networking, and concurrency. An entire chapter is devoted to Ruby's metaprogramming capabilities. The Ruby Programming Language documents the Ruby language definitively but without the formality of a language specification. It is written for experienced programmers who are new to Ruby, and for current Ruby programmers who want to challenge their understanding and increase their mastery of the language.

Amazon.com® Reader Reviews (Ranked by Helpfulness)

Average Amazon.com® Rating:  Based on 28 Ratings

A remarkable programming language book - 2009-08-22
Reviewer Rating:
This book is focused, straight to the point, dense, fun to read and enjoyable with it's strong logical flow of ideas, language construct details and intuitive presentation of the core Ruby language features and fundamentals that take the reader very confidently into a knowledge rich journey inside the programming language of Ruby and its core philosophy only to yield the willing reader an expert Ruby programmer.

Right from the first chapter:introduction. You are hooked! time passes by and you never notice, as the elite writers of this book (Why the lucky stiff, Flanagan, and Matz), concisely and deeply describe the language and then start enjoying us with more elaborate knowledge on Ruby structure, Data types and objects, expressions and operators, control structure, methods, classes, and reflection in the following chapters.

May I say that, with all the known elegance and appeal of the Ruby language, this stunning book comes with it's unique clear style of writing, richness and deep coverage while concise, that is in my opinion the best ever written programming language book so far.

Remarkable!

Not sure if this is the best book to start! - 2009-10-05
Reviewer Rating:
I bought this book after reading the other reviews here. All the people I know personally who work with Ruby learned from the Pickaxe but from the reviews I came to the conclusion that this could be actually a better book for learning the language. So, I didn't read the Pickaxe and cannot really make a comparison but from what I heard and comparing with this one I would get the Pickaxe if I should choose again.

After finishing reading this book I can say that there are a lot of topics that I really don't remember anymore and lots of doubts that I still have. The major flaw here is that there are no exercises anywhere in the book. All the best programming books I read in the past have very good exercises to evaluate what you've learned (I could give as examples Learning Perl, C++ Programming Language, Core Java, etc). I think that without exercising what you learned it's really hard to judge how much you have really learned.

Another thing which is not described in the book is how to organize a big project. I'm used to working in large projects in C and C++ and I really have no idea of how to organize a large project in Ruby, how to organize classes in files, etc. I will start studying Rails now, and will get the Rails code and read it to make sense of how to organize a large project but be aware that this is not described here.

Also some sections of the book, are really "dry", like the one who talks about functional programming which is really hard to follow (this one is the first that came to my mind but there are a lot of sections which are hard to follow or don't make a lot of sense when reading first time). These sections are clearly targeted at advanced Ruby programmers.

I'll rate this book with 4 stars because despite the flaws I mentioned, the explanation of the language in general is really good.

best ruby book - 2009-09-13
Reviewer Rating:
Functions both as a textbook and a fairly "quick" reference. Kudos to the authors for their clarity and just the right amount of unambiguous detail.

Get this Book! - 2009-06-28
Reviewer Rating:
This is a fantastic book for beginning rubyists that have a decent programming background with another language. I would still recommend reading the Pick Axe, but once your done with that, get ready to blow your mind with all the cool things this book shows you that they couldn't fit into the Pick Axe. Its clear explanations and code examples make it a breeze to go through. I wish more programming books where written like this. It is definitely worth the price of admission. You won't be sorry

the manual to follow - 2009-06-05
Reviewer Rating:
feels like i am reading the C programming language book by K&R ... the style is very similar ... although i am in for a paradigm shift ... also, my way of learning is to try to grasp it all at once ... so, i am a bit slower than (a lot actually)i had expected to finish the book ... still only in the 4th chapter after 2 weeks

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