You don't have to know everything about a car to drive one, and you don't need to know everything about Ruby to start programming with it. Written for both experienced and new programmers alike, Learning Ruby is a just-get-in-and-drive book -- a hands-on tutorial that offers lots of Ruby programs and lets you know how and why they work, just enough to get you rolling down the road. Interest in Ruby stems from the popularity of Rails, the web development framework that's attracting new devotees and refugees from Java and PHP. But there are plenty of other uses for this versatile language. The best way to learn is to just try the code! You'll find examples on nearly every page of this book that you can imitate and hack. Briefly, this book:

• Outlines many of the most important features of Ruby

• Demonstrates how to use conditionals, and how to manipulate strings in Ruby. Includes a section on regular expressions

• Describes how to use operators, basic math, functions from the Math module, rational numbers, etc.

• Talks you through Ruby arrays, and demonstrates hashes in detail

• Explains how to process files with Ruby

• Discusses Ruby classes and modules (mixins) in detail, including a brief introduction to object-oriented programming (OOP)

• Introduces processing XML, the Tk toolkit, RubyGems, reflection, RDoc, embedded Ruby, metaprogramming, exception handling, and other topics

• Acquaints you with some of the essentials of Rails, and includes a short Rails tutorial.

Each chapter concludes with a set of review questions, and appendices provide you with a glossary of terms related to Ruby programming, plus reference material from the book in one convenient location. If you want to take Ruby out for a drive, Learning Ruby holds the keys.

Amazon.com® Reader Reviews (Ranked by Helpfulness)

Average Amazon.com® Rating:  Based on 18 Ratings

Excellent Overview - 2008-05-16
Reviewer Rating:
This is a great introduction to Ruby. It covers the basics without swamping the fledgling programmer in too much complexity. That's not what newcomers need. They aren't worried about the nooks and crannies of the array class; they're wondering what the heck an array is, and what makes it different from a hash. In that respect, this book strikes a nice balance.

Having read (and bought) most of the O'Reilly books on Ruby, Perl, and Python, I can honestly say that this book ranks high at the top of them--not because it is the definitive work on Ruby (it isn't and isn't supposed to be), but because it covers the core essentials in a way that you can read in an afternoon. For that reason, it is an excellent choice for a first timer in Ruby and/or programming to see why Ruby is a great language worth learning, without having to get a computer science degree first, and without having to hire a Sherpa to help them lug their book around while they read it (I'll refrain from pointing fingers at other books here).

I think that's one thing many of the reviewers missed about this book. "Learning Ruby" is designed for the newcomer who wants to get jump started in Ruby, not for the experienced programming who is just looking for a nutshell summary.

I would also like to add that at one point, I had a question about what was included with the one-click installation system and emailed the author, who very quickly investigated the problem and emailed me back with an answer. You have to admit: that's pretty impressive.

Now, there are areas of the book that should probably be expanded on for the next edition. Primarily, I'm thinking of a chapter devoted to regular expressions a la "Learning Perl", a chapter devoted to IO (this would be brief but handy) including a section on string interpolation and how to use and combine string methods (a very cool aspect of Ruby), and finally an expansion on the chapter involving classes to address a few of the things that some of the other reviewers have already identified as important but missing.

However, those are not fatal by any means, and for the first edition in a relatively new language, this book is well worth the time and money.

Very good book for what it was done for! - 2008-03-03
Reviewer Rating:
I don't understand why some people complain about this book's simplicity. That's exactly what the book was done for and that's exactly what to author states in the first lines. This book is to get you up and running quickly and NOT to turn you into a Ruby master. I read the Dave Thomas book and it is complicated. It is also boring most of the time. This one is for busy developer who wants to get the basic first and teach himself the advanced stuff later. This book is thin and objective, pretty much like Ruby. If you want to start coding quickly buy this code. If you want to "entertain" yourself over some months with a bunch of theory buy Dave Thomas' book.

Incomplete (rushing), lots of errors, no feedback from the author - 2007-12-31
Reviewer Rating:
This isn't the book that "does one thing but does it extremely good". If the author wants to cut corner (due to the depth of Ruby as a language), he should cut some features not the explanation.

When you have code like this:

[An example of rolling 2 dices]
r_1 = rand(6); r_2 = rand(6)
r1 = r1>0?r_1:1; r2 = r2>0?r_2:6

And a comment like this:
"...a little fancy footwork to make sure it does not return 0..."

These are signs that you just got duped.

Often I have to guess why he wrote certain piece of code the way he likes it. Explanation does not exist.

There are errors in the books. I've filed them on O'reilly website but found out that the author does not verify them. Others had voiced the same concern as well on O'reilly website.

I would suggest others to buy "Beginning Ruby" from APress if you're looking for an alternative books on Ruby aside from the "PickAxe" (Programming in Ruby 2nd Ed by Pragmatic Bookshelf) book. "Beginning Ruby" is 3 dollars more expensive but covers Ruby more and have better rating.

One last note:
AVOID ALL O'REILLY BOOKS ON WEB 2.0 (OR HOT TOPICS).

Learning JavaScript is not much different than Learning Ruby book. Read the review if you don't believe me.

Learning JavaScript (bad)
Learning Ruby (bad)
Ruby on Rails: Up and Running (bad)
Learning C# (ain't no better than C# for Dummies or Teach Yourself series)

O'reilly is selling thin books with "thick book" price. Shame on you Tim.

A great introduction - 2009-05-28
Reviewer Rating:
This was my very first introduction in Ruby. After Having seen a friend build a Rails website in a few minutes I was impressed and wanted to know about Ruby.
The bookstore had two books on ruby, this one and the other being the massive pickaxe. I chose this book since I was not prepared to read such a huge book. I just wanted a brief into to see what it was all about.

Learning Ruby
The book starts with the basics and a quick tour of Ruby. After the first two chapters you start to have a rough idea about what Ruby is and what it's for. After the two introductory chapters, the usual language basics follow. Conditional loops, strings, math, arrays, hashes, working with files and classes are all dealt with. After that one chapter deals with various things such as processing XML, reflection, metaprogramming, RDoc and embedded ruby. The last chapter is a brief intro on Rails.

Conclusion
The title of the book was a poor choice. It should have been something like 'introducing ruby' for example. The best feature of this book was its shortness and simplicity, while still giving a good introduction to the world of Ruby. What I missed were some short introductions on things such as TDD, Merb, Sinatra, Shoes etc. After reading this book you won't have the feeling you have 'learned' Ruby. You have a good picture of what it is and what it can do. You know a bit of the syntax and how to use irb and check out documentation. You also know about a few extra things such as RDoc and Rails. The book is well written and I had no problems running the code for all except a Tk example. It's a nice book for the absolute beginners in programming, but I think there are better suited books for the absolute beginners out there. Instead, people who have a bit of experience in other programming languages, and just want to know what all the fuss is about will enjoy this book. This book is not for those that really want to learn about the language and it's inner workings and reasoning behind it.

http://geekatlarge.blogspot.com/2009/05/books-anyone.html

Good For Beginners - 2009-02-03
Reviewer Rating:
Learning Ruby is a great book for experts and novices that are looking to learn Ruby. It effectively addresses the needs of people who are learning Ruby as their first programming language and people who already know many languages. This book shows many good code examples that demonstrate the power of the language in an easy to understand way while showing good programming techniques. It flows in a very easy to follow fashion with one section immediately building on the previous.

I feel comfortable after reading this book to use Ruby for basic scripting tasks and application development. I look forward to learning more about the language after seeing the power that it has to offer to a programmer. I would recommend this book to anyone who is interested in learning Ruby as a first language. If you are looking to learn some of the more in-depth features of Ruby I would suggest looking at O'Reilly's Ruby Cookbook.

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