Ruby is an increasingly popular, fully object-oriented dynamic
programming language, hailed by many practitioners as the finest and
most useful language available today. When Ruby first burst onto the
scene in the Western world, the Pragmatic Programmers were there with
the definitive reference manual, Programming Ruby: The Pragmatic
Programmer's Guide.
Now in its second edition, author Dave Thomas has expanded the famous
Pickaxe book with over 200 pages of new content, covering all the
improved language features of Ruby 1.8 and standard library modules. The
Pickaxe contains four major sections:
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An acclaimed tutorial on using Ruby.
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The definitive reference to the language.
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Complete documentation on all built-in classes, modules, and methods
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Complete descriptions of all 98 standard libraries.
If you enjoyed the First Edition, you'll appreciate the expanded
content, including enhanced coverage of installation, packaging,
documenting Ruby source code, threading and synchronization, and
enhancing Ruby's capabilities using C-language extensions. Programming
for the World Wide Web is easy in Ruby, with new chapters on XML/RPC,
SOAP, distributed Ruby, templating systems, and other web services.
There's even a new chapter on unit testing.
This is the definitive reference manual for Ruby, including a
description of all the standard library modules, a complete reference to
all built-in classes and modules (including more than 250 significant
changes since the First Edition). Coverage of other features has grown
tremendously, including details on how to harness the sophisticated
capabilities of irb, so you can dynamically examine and experiment with
your running code. "Ruby is a wonderfully powerful and useful language,
and whenever I'm working with it this book is at my side" --Martin
Fowler, Chief Scientist, ThoughtWorks
