The Ruby Programming Language is the authoritative guide to Ruby and provides comprehensive coverage of versions 1.8 and 1.9 of the language. It was written (and illustrated!) by an all-star team:

David Flanagan, bestselling author of programming language "bibles" (including JavaScript: The Definitive Guide and Java in a Nutshell) and committer to the Ruby Subversion repository.

Yukihiro "Matz" Matsumoto, creator, designer and lead developer of Ruby and author of Ruby in a Nutshell, which has been expanded and revised to become this book.

why the lucky stiff, artist and Ruby programmer extraordinaire.

This book begins with a quick-start tutorial to the language, and then explains the language in detail from the bottom up: from lexical and syntactic structure to datatypes to expressions and statements and on through methods, blocks, lambdas, closures, classes and modules.

The book also includes a long and thorough introduction to the rich API of the Ruby platform, demonstrating -- with heavily-commented example code -- Ruby's facilities for text processing, numeric manipulation, collections, input/output, networking, and concurrency. An entire chapter is devoted to Ruby's metaprogramming capabilities.

The Ruby Programming Language documents the Ruby language definitively but without the formality of a language specification. It is written for experienced programmers who are new to Ruby, and for current Ruby programmers who want to challenge their understanding and increase their mastery of the language.

David Flanagan

David Flanagan is a computer programmer who spends most of his time writing about JavaScript and Java. His books with O'Reilly include JavaScript: The Definitive Guide, JavaScript Pocket Reference, Java in a Nutshell, Java Examples in a Nutshell, and Java Foundation Classes in a Nutshell. David has a degree in computer science and engineering from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. He lives with his wife and children in the U.S. Pacific Northwest bewteen the cities of Seattle, Washington and Vancouver, British Columbia. David has a blog at www.davidflanagan.com.

Yukihiro Matsumoto

Yukihiro Matsumoto ("Matz"), the creator of Ruby, is a professional programmer who worked for the Japanese open source company, netlab.jp. Matz is also known as one of the open source evangelists in Japan. He's released several open source products, including cmail, the emacs-based mail user agent, written entirely in emacs lisp. Ruby is his first piece of software that has become known outside of Japan.

The animals on the cover of The Ruby Programming Language are Horned Sungem hummingbirds (Heliactin bilophus). These small birds are native to South America, living mainly in Brazil and Bolivia. They prefer dry, open habitats such as grasslands, and they avoid dense or humid forests.

Hummingbirds have the fastest wingbeat of all birds, and the Horned Sungem is capable of 90 wingbeats per second. (Contrast that with the vulture, the slowest of all birds, capable of just 1 wingbeat per second.) Because hummingbirds are so fast and light, they are able to hover in mid-air by rapidly flapping their wings. They can also fly backward (the only birds who can do so) in order to keep position as they drink nectar from flowers. Their long, thin bills allow them to reach deep within blossoms. Fittingly, the Portuguese word for hummingbird is beija-flor, or "the bird that kisses flowers." The English word, of course, comes from the hum made by its fast-moving wings.

The male Horned Sungem has tufts of red, blue, and gold feathers on either side of its head. Its back is iridescent green, its throat and breast are black, and its belly is white. It has a long, pointed tail. The female looks similar to the male but lacks the dramatic crown pattern. Because of the hummingbird's vibrant colors, early Spanish explorers named it Joyas voladoras, or "flying jewel."

There are many myths about hummingbirds. In Brazil, a black hummingbird is a sign of a death in the family. The ancient Aztecs honored them, and priests used staffs covered with their feathers to remove curses. The hummingbird is also a symbol of resurrection, as Aztecs believed that dead warriors were reincarnated as these birds. The Aztec god of the Sun and war, Huitzilopochtli, was represented as one; his name means "Hummingbird from the south," the south being the location of the spirit world.

The cover image is from J. G. Wood's Animate Creation. The cover font is Adobe's ITC Garamond. The text font is Linotype Birka, the heading font is Adobe Myriad Condensed, and the code font is LucasFont's TheSans Mono Condensed.

This book is like no other got me 'up and running' in the Ruby world. It gives you strong basis to build your mastery on. It is very comprehensive and explains every little detail about how Ruby works yet easy to read. I keep it on my desk and I recommend it to everyone who wants to learn Ruby.The saddest thing about the book is that it is TOO OLD and requires a NEW EDITION which would include all the cool new features that Ruby got after v. 2.0To O'R: PLEASE shed some light about the possible future editions. This book is highly valued in the Ruby community and a LOT of people out there expects the new edition!

If you want to learn all about the nitty-gritty of how ruby does its magic, then this book is for you. It doesn't just give you the "what it does", but also the "how it does it", and sometimes even the "why it does it".

Very useful and complete book on Ruby for professionals starters on this language, already aware of OO programming techniques and languages.Can be used to grasp the basics of the language by, say, Java developers that want to increase their knowledge and capabilities spectrum.

I've bought this book when it first came out and recommended to everyone who was asking for literature about ruby.

It is very well written and answers almost all questions. What I especially like about is that it doesn't start with yet another tutorial or too much conversational text without real information on the topic itself.

It contains what the cover says, nothing more. It is straight forward and a pleasure to read. As easy as it sounds, this is something you can rarely find in technical books and this is what makes this book exceptional I think.

Regardless of whether you're a fan of Ruby, The Ruby Programming Language is one of the finest pieces of technical writing that I have ever laid eyes on. The book is extremely well organized, and details every nook and cranny of the language.

This book does for Ruby what Kernighan & Ritchie's "The C Programming Language" did for C. It provides a concise, accessible introduction to the Ruby programming language.

Starting out with a tour of Ruby, you are then taken on a deeper dive into chapters on "Structure and Execution", "Datatypes and Objects", "Expressions and Operators", and "Statements and Control Structures". Some of the real power of Ruby is revealed in chapters on "Methods, Procs, Lambdas, and Closures", "Classes and Modules", and "Reflection and Metaprogramming".

The book closes with chapters on "The Ruby Platform" and "The Ruby Environment". The chapter on the Ruby Platform is like a condensed API guide to Ruby's core library. The chapter on the Ruby Environment will help you navigate through the Ruby interpreter's command-line arguments and environment variables as well as a grab-bag of extra Ruby topics that were not covered earlier in the book.

The book is well organized and easy to read. Each chapter is peppered with code samples. If you are serious about learning Ruby, get this book! It sits on my bookshelf, next to a copy of the Pickaxe book and The Ruby Way. Bonus: each chapter of the book starts with a work of art by why the lucky stiff!

Like the book says in the beginning: "Ruby is not a simple language... and this book is not a simple book. It is intended for experienced programmers... and are willing to read carefully and thoughtfully to achieve this goal."

Ruby is still relatively new, so there are not a ton of books from which to choose. But you gotta figure that one by the creator of the language (Y. Matsumoto) and the author of the popular "Java in a Nutshell" (D. Flanagan) is bound to be good - and it is.

It's a simple, no-nonsense text that will answer just about any question you might have about the Ruby programming language. This and the more-conversational-in-tone "The Ruby Way" by Hal Fulton make for an unbeatable pair.