Learning Ruby

Preface

Ruby has gotten a lot of attention since the appearance of Ruby on Rails, the web application framework written in Ruby. The attention is way past due. Ruby has been around as long as Java but enjoyed only limited attention outside of Japan until around 2000. In the last few years, Ruby’s popularity has steadily grown, and with good reason.

Who Should Read This Book?

Generally, I figure two kinds of readers will buy this book: experienced programmers who want to learn Ruby, and new programmers who want to learn to program. I have the interesting job of catering to both while trying not to tick off either. It’s a balancing act, and this is how I’ll handle it: I am going to address you as if you are already a competent programmer, but I’ll also provide plenty of help for beginners, mostly in the form of notes or sidebars. I’ll let you know when you can skip a section if you are already a heavy hitter.

If you’re a fairly experienced programmer, you might just want to read the code examples first, from the beginning of the book to the end, skimming the explanations surrounding the examples as needed. You should be able to see what’s going on fairly quickly just by keeping your eyes on the code. The code is laid out in a more or less logical fashion (to me at least), so you should be able to figure out Ruby in fairly short order. If you are new to programming, I have attempted to make your job a little easier by explaining things as I go along.

How This Book Works

Do you have to know ...