The Well-Grounded Rubyist takes you from interested novice to proficient practitioner. It's a beautifully written tutorial that begins with the basic steps to get your first Ruby program up and running and goes on to explore sophisticated topics like callable objects, reflection, and threading. Whether the topic is simple or tough, the book's easy-to-follow examples and explanations will give you immediate confidence as you build your Ruby programming skills. The Well-Grounded Rubyist is a thoroughly revised and updated edition of the best-selling Ruby for Rails. In this new book, expert author David A. Black moves beyond Rails and presents a broader view of Ruby. It covers Ruby 1.9, and keeps the same sharp focus and clear writing that made Ruby for Rails stand out. Starting with the basics, The Well-Grounded Rubyist explains Ruby objects and their interactions from the ground up. In the middle chapters, the book turns to an examination of Ruby's built-in, core classes, showing the reader how to manipulate strings, numbers, arrays, ranges, hashes, sets, and more. Regular expressions get attention, as do file and other I/O operations. Along the way, the reader is introduced to numerous tools included in the standard Ruby distribution--tools like the task manager Rake and the interactive Ruby console-based interpreter Irb--that facilitate Ruby development and make it an integrated and pleasant experience. The book encompasses advanced topics, like the design of Ruby's class and module system, and the use of Ruby threads, taking even the new Rubyist deep into the language and giving every reader the foundations necessary to use, explore, and enjoy this unusually popular and versatile language. It's no wonder one reader commented: "The technical depth is just right to not distract beginners, yet detailed enough for more advanced readers."

Amazon.com® Reader Reviews (Ranked by Helpfulness)

Average Amazon.com® Rating:  Based on 8 Ratings

important read - 2009-06-25
Reviewer Rating:
If you have any doubts about your Ruby knowledge, then you should read this book. After months of frustration while looking at source code and wasting time with Why's Poignant Guide, I made it a point to read through all pages of the Well-Grounded Rubyist. Once I was done, the difficulty was gone. Now I can read Rails code with ease, all the code makes sense and I feel like I entered a whole new world. David Black guides the reader through the topics he feels are most important. I resisted the temptation to put down the book and start programming, but I am glad I waited. The book is so useful that having finished it, you will be on a new level and your next task will be to learn how Ruby's powerful features can be combined into non-trivial frameworks. If you skip this book, you risk writing mediocre code, at least until you are forced to learn the features and techniques of the language...the hard way.

Very disciplined, accurate, language tutor - 2009-08-16
Reviewer Rating:
David Black has written a thoughtfully balanced book on Ruby basics and best practices. Thankfully, it doesn't waste a single page on things better off on a website somewhere. For example, no elaboration of differences between Ruby 1.9.1 and earlier versions. (Which are, in fact, found on the book's website!)

The book is written referencing Ruby 1.9.1. Be aware that as of this writing, there isn't a 1-click installer on the Ruby language site for 1.9.1 for Windows, and the binaries-only download doesn't include a few key DLLs. If you want to continue using 1.8.6 until an up-to-date installer comes along, the bulk of the book will still be perfectly usable, however. The last note on Windows is that there is text sprinkled throughout the book on such things as paths and other configuration minutia which is specific to Mac and Unix installs. This should not trouble the readers intended for this book in the least.

As a practical matter, since the author spends no time on basic programming concepts, you'll have to have some programming experience to take best advantage of this book. Expressed differently, there is no wasted text for its audience. As one with such experience, I found this to be a perfectly-conceived bootstrap approach to the language. Anyone already having basic OO concepts already should have no difficulty following this book (mine being Smalltalk).

The author and publisher appear to have taken great pains in the flow, layout, and editing to produce a virtually error-free work. I'm enormously appreciative of that; for its own sake, of course, but also because error-riddled computer book are all too common. There are some very minor errors posted on the book's blog on the publisher's website, but they are trivial, in my opinion (programmers are persnickety, particularly about semantics, and rightfully so).

Black's intent is to walk the reader through key aspects of the language, OO as it directly relates to Ruby, and a slice of the core library. Take note of the last comment - this is NOT a comprehensive language reference covering the entire core library. Instead, the author is trying to cover those portions of the library he deems most important to understand when learning Ruby. He succeeds. While the book starts out with the simplest of Ruby's elements, such as syntax, by the end of the volume, you're well into more advanced usages, including reflection, overriding core behavior, and more.

One of the best programming books I've bought in terms of clarity, presentation, and flow. And over 25 years, there have been a lot of them.

review by Eric Grimois - 2009-06-29
Reviewer Rating:
"The Well-grounded Rubyist" belongs to these still too rare books which deal exclusively and in-depth with Ruby, by leaving Rails, its killer app, on side. David A. Black proposes to give us a strong foundation for the comprehension of the Ruby's mechanisms. On this purpose, he adopts a didactic and original step, by presenting the concepts according to a progressive and well balanced difficulty, not following the "traditional" progression found in other books treating of computer programming languages. Thus, for example, the method lookup strategy is described in chapter 4, even before looking in detail at the test and loop instructions in chapter 6. This order, which can seem curious at first sight, appears finally perfectly logical and natural. This progressive and cumulative approach will however impose to the reader a linear reading of the book to withdraw all the benefit from it.

Focusing himself on the fundamental mechanisms of Ruby, the author only partially cover its built-in classes and modules library, in the second part of the book. After a long description of essential (predefined classes, conversion methods, enumerators etc) he devotes two whole chapters to the extensive Ruby's possibilities about I/O operations and regular expressions.

The three final chapters, which compose the third and last part of the book, treat dynamic aspects of Ruby. What would appear to be the most complex topic of the book is in fact surprisingly easy to assimilate, and one realizes that the efforts of the author to gradually lead us to a sufficient knowledge of Ruby in order to tackle without pain the most difficult subjects, bore its fruits.

This book is intended more particularly for those who discover Ruby, but will be also advantageous to more advanced Ruby developers. Thus, the talent of the author enabled me to completely understand certain of mechanisms I used without mastering them, and which I never had seen exposed anywhere so clearly. The wise advice of the author, lavished throughout the book, to make good use of the exceptional richness of Ruby will also benefit to all readers.

As good as it is, this book presents however some small defects: the author always wanting to make sure you hit the point, some explanations are slightly verbose, and its deliberate choice to not speak about the important differences occurred between Ruby 1.8 and 1.9 may annoy some readers. But these few defects are really minors in regard of the great qualities of this book, and I completely recommend it.

Another Home Run by David Black - 2009-08-08
Reviewer Rating:
David continues to just knock 'em out of the park. This is a must-have book if you want to learn Ruby, refresh your mind about things you've forgotten, or want to see what's new in version 1.9

I'd rate the "Big 3" Ruby books as follows:

1st: This book
2nd: The Ruby Programming Language by Flanagan and Matz
3rd: Programming Ruby 1.9 by Dave Thomas

Best Ruby book for beginners to Ruby - 2009-09-09
Reviewer Rating:
I finished this book in 18 hours over a period of 18 days. It is very well written, easy to read and takes the reader from simple to complex topics in a gradual way. It helped me to connect the dots together.

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