David Flanagan, author of many books including most recently The Ruby Programming Language observed that this month marks Ruby’s 15th birthday. David confirmed with Yukihiro “Matz” Matsumoto–creator of Ruby and David’s coauthor on the aforementioned book–that, indeed, Ruby was conceptualized and named on Feb. 24, 1993. Mark your calendars. While this doesn’t yet qualify Ruby as an old-timer among programming languages, it’s a good indication that it’s here to stay and probably doesn’t deserve to be called a newcomer any more.

If you’re a Ruby fan, you’ll want to take a look at David’s and Matz’s book, which is positioned to be the authoritative guide to Ruby, covering versions 1.8 and 1.9 of the language. “I believe this is the first book to cover version 1.9,” Matz said. Apparently David was writing furiously while the core Ruby team, including Matz, made constant changes to the language. “It was a tough job to write a book on a target moving so fast,” Matz said. “It’s really a great accomplishment.”

The book also features original drawings by why the lucky stiff, Ruby programmer and artist extraordinaire.

And, if you really want to impress your friends, you can wow them with this bit of O’Reilly trivia: the birds on the cover of the book are not the common Ruby-throated hummingbirds, as logical as that might seem. Instead, they are sungem hummingbirds. “This is appropriate for a book on Ruby because Ruby programs and libraries of Ruby code are often packaged into modules known as gems,” David tells us.

Other Important Stuff

Michael Bernstein won a copy of SOA in Practice for posting his comment to the blog. Michael is an information architect who has been a member of the Zope development community since early 1999, wrote the first community-contributed “How-To” for Zope in February of that year, and is the creator and editor of the Open Source category in the Open Directory Project. More recently, Michael co-authored the ‘Zope Bible’ published by Hungry Minds. Thanks for reading and posting, Michael!

Soon to be announced is the winner of Head First JavaScript.