Ruby by Example

Motivations for the Book

This book tries to be both useful in the immediate term and informative in the long term. These goals have a profound impact on how the book is organized.

It’s also meant to be accessible to neophytes, but it focuses on programming paradigms and their impact on both language design and language use—topics common to academic programming books. These days, you can use any popular language for most tasks, but that doesn’t mean that solving a given problem will be equally painless in every language. No language exists in a vacuum, and a discussion of a language like Ruby should acknowledge the decisions that went into its design. You’ll find that it’s a very flexible language that lets you combine different approaches in powerful ...