The Ruby Programming Language

I may not have posted recently, but I haven’t been completely away. Besides doing another 30 or so miles of hiking with my scouts (getting ready for a three day backpacking trip next weekend) and spending a lot of energy on my day job, I’ve also been spending some time with a couple of books. The first one that I want to tell you about is The Ruby Programming Language

This reworking of the old Ruby in a Nutshell is a huge improvement over the old book. It’s got coverage of 1.8 and 1.9, and features an illustration by why the lucky stiff at the beginning of each chapter. This is not the book that most people will want to use to learn Ruby. For that, I’d still go with either Programming Ruby or Beginning Ruby (see my review of the latter if you’d like).

Chapters Six (Methods, Procs, Lambdas, and Closures) and Eight (Reflection and Metaprogramming) are worth the price of the book alone. These should be required reading for all aspiring Rubyists.

The book as a whole stands as a worthy alternative to David Black’s Ruby For Rails or Hal Fulton’s The Ruby Way—and that’s pretty high praise.