When Dave Thomas and Andy Hunt, authors of The Pragmatic Programmer, published the first edition of Programming Ruby in 2000, it was the first English language Ruby book. Ruby documentation was so scant that they had to study the source code to do it, as Ruby's author, Matz, explains in his foreword. For 2005, they revised it to cover Ruby 1.8, the latest major release.
Though there are now several other Ruby books, Programming Ruby is still trying to do it all -- language tutorial, language reference, a guide to thinking in Ruby (which includes thinking in objects), and an introduction to the Ruby community's conventions. The book is broader than it is deep, but, given its breadth, that's praising with faint damns.
It's not a book for a programming novice, but the language tutorial was thorough and clear. Moderately experienced programmers should have no problems with it. If you've done object-oriented and functional programming before, it'll be easy going.
I was impressed by how much the book includes of what you need to actually develop in Ruby -- trying code snippets in the interactive Ruby shell, debugging, watching out for Ruby's gotchas, developing a test suite, documenting (in Rdoc, a Ruby standard), packaging code into a Ruby Gem (RubyGems is Ruby's equivalent to Perl's CPAN), profiling your code to find the slow parts, and how to extend Ruby in C to speed them up.
There's a brief survey of using Ruby for Web, Tk, and Win32 programming. The book's emphasis on breadth over depth is most obvious here -- 18 pages on web programming doesn't just cover CGI programming, but touches on cookies, session maintenance, two template systems for HTML generation, eruby (a means of embedding Ruby in HTML, like PHP, Mason, PSP, or the other *SPs), SOAP, WSDL, and the Google API. (Ruby on Rails is mentioned only as a framework "currently attracting mindshare in the Ruby community.")
For all their brevity, these chapters were still useful. They're a starting point for learning available tools for those problem domains. More importantly, they demonstrate the breadth of the standard library and other available packages, and provide a lesson in looking for existing solutions first. That's old hat to people used to the open source world, but it could prove invaluable to someone who wandered in from the outside.
Almost half the book is a reference to the built-in classes and modules, and to the standard library. Ruby has dozens of built-in classes, each, typically, with dozens of methods, so it's no surprise that a lot of this information went unmentioned in the language tutorial. In my use of the reference so far, I've found it clear and well-organized.
Perl played a part in inspiring Ruby. Likewise, it strikes me that Programming Ruby's authors probably took inspiration from Programming Perl. It's even nicknamed for its cover illustration -- the PickAxe Book. And, like the Camel Book, it goes beyond the language at hand to advance general principles of good programming: code reuse, writing for maintainability, and avoiding reinventing the wheel. And it's all written with an infectious joy in programming.
My only complaint about the book is that the index is spotty in its coverage of the language tutorial chapters -- I've felt frustrated trying to find discussions of things because, too often, the index only pointed to the reference section's coverage of them.
But the book left me excited about programming in Ruby, and gave me all I needed to begin. That's all I could ask from an introduction to a new language.
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