If you are new to Ruby, there is an O'Reilly title you may want to check out: Learning Ruby by Michael Fitzgerald. This book is a short and concise introduction to the Ruby programming language that will help any Ruby newbie come up to speed quickly. At 238 pages, it is a light, easy read.
Experienced programmers will find a book that jumps right in and introduces language features one after another. The basics are covered in the first chapter, followed by a fairly comprehensive 'Quick Tour of Ruby' in the second chapter. After that, each chapter spends more time with a certain aspect of Ruby, like conditional operators, strings, math, arrays and hashes, files and classes.
The detailed chapters are followed by a chapter that covers some extras like processing XML, working with dates and times, reflection, metaprogramming, and exception handling among other topics. A final chapter takes a dip into the Ruby on Rails framework with a quick, 18 page tour.
The book finishes with a 'Ruby Reference' in Appendix A and the answers to the end-of-chapter questions in Appendix B. The Ruby Reference packs a lot of info into a handful of pages and is a great shortcut to the online documentation if the book happens to be next to your computer.
I enjoyed reading this book and the author's sometimes irreverent writing style.
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