P2.1. Audience

This book isn’t really written with the Ruby beginner in mind, and certainly won’t be very useful to someone brand new to programming. Instead, I assume a decent technical grasp of the Ruby language and at least some practical experience in developing software with it. However, you needn’t be some guru in order to benefit from this book. The most important thing is that you actually care about improving the way you write Ruby code.

As long as you have at least an intermediate level of experience, reading through the book should be enjoyable. You’ll want to have your favorite reference book handy to look things up as needed. Either The Ruby Programming Language by David Flanagan and Yukihiro Matsumoto (O’Reilly) or Programming Ruby, Third Edition, by Dave Thomas (Pragmatic Bookshelf) should do the trick.

It is also important to note that this is a Ruby 1.9 book. It makes no attempt to provide notes on the differences between Ruby 1.8 and 1.9 except for in a brief appendix designed specifically for that purpose. Although many of the code samples will likely work with little or no modifications for earlier versions of Ruby, Ruby 1.9 is the way forward, and I have chosen to focus on it exclusively in this book. Although the book may still be useful to those maintaining legacy code, it is admittedly geared more toward the forward-looking crowd.