Why's (poignant) Guide to Ruby is an introductory book
to the Ruby programming language, written by why the lucky stiff.
The book includes some wacky humour and goes off-topic
on occasions. Further, the book includes jokes that are known within
the Ruby
community as well as cartoon characters.
The contents of the book:
About this book
Kon'nichi wa, Ruby
A Quick (and Hopefully Painless) Ride Through Ruby
(with Cartoon Foxes): basic introduction to central Ruby concepts
Floating Little Leaves of Code: evaluation and
values, hashes and lists
Them What Make the Rules and Them What Live the
Dream: case/when, while/until, variable scope, blocks, methods, class
definitions, class attributes, objects, modules, introspection in IRB,
dup, self, rbconfig module
Downtown: metaprogramming, regular expressions
When You Wish Upon a Beard: send method, new methods
in existing classes
Heaven's Harp
This book is made available under the
Attribution-ShareAlike
License. The official website is no longer working, but a PDF copy of
the book can be downloaded from www.rubyinside.com/media/poignant-guide.pdf
Ruby Essentials is a free on-line book designed to
provide a concise and easy to follow guide to learning Ruby. Everything
from installing Ruby and the basics of the language through to topics
such as arrays, file handling and object-oriented programming are
covered, all combined with easy to understand code examples which serve
to bridge the gap between theory and practice.
Ruby Essentials is intended to be of equal use both to
those experienced in other programming languages and to novices who
have chosen Ruby as their "first programming language".
The Book Of Ruby is a free in-depth guide to Ruby
programming. It is distributed by SapphireSteel Software
- developers of the Ruby In Steel IDE for Visual Studio.
The Book Of Ruby is provided in the form
of a PDF document in which each chapter is accompanied by ready-to-run
source code for all the examples. There is also an Introduction which
explains how to use the source code in Ruby In Steel or any other
editor/IDE of your choice plus appendices and an index.
The book is divided up into bite-sized chunks. Each
chapter introduces a theme which is subdivided into sub-topics. Each
programming topic is accompanied by one or more small self-contained,
ready-to-run Ruby programs.
Strings, Numbers, Classes, and Objects
Class Hierarchies, Attributes, and Class Variables
Ruby is an interpreted, object-oriented programming
language.
The book is broken down into several sections and is
intended to be read sequentially.
Getting started - shows users how to install and
begin
using Ruby in an environment
Basic Ruby - explains the main features of the syntax
of Ruby. It covers, amongst other things, strings, encoding, writing
methods, classes and objects, and exceptions
Ruby Semantic reference
Built in classes
Available modules covers some of the standard library
Intermediate Ruby covers a selection of slightly more
advanced topics
Each section is designed to be self contained. The book
is released under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike License.
