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.
