Ruby in a Nutshell

Preface

Ruby in a Nutshell is a practical reference covering everything from Ruby syntax to the specifications of its standard class libraries. With portability and convenience in mind, I have arranged it into a concise tool that provides just the information you need while programming. Although this book is based on Ruby 1.6.5, its contents should remain applicable to future versions of Ruby, and many of the changes that will be included in Version 1.8 are shown in Chapter 6.

This book covers all the built-in features and standard bundled libraries of Ruby. It isn’t an introductory book; rather it works best sitting top of your desk when you program in Ruby. The book assumes you have prior programming experience, preferably in Ruby. System programming experience may be required to understand some parts of the book, for example, network programming using sockets.

This book doesn’t cover the Ruby C API for extending and embedding Ruby, nor does it cover additional libraries, e.g., those available from RAA (http://www.ruby-lang.org/en/raa.html). For information on these topics, please consult the online documents available at http://www.ruby-lang.org, other books, or you can wait for O’Reilly to publish books on them. :-)