Learning Ruby

You don't have to know everything about a car to drive one, and you don't need to know everything about Ruby to start programming with it. Written for both experienced and new programmers alike, Learning Ruby is a just-get-in-and-drive book — a hands-on tutorial that offers lots of Ruby programs and lets you know how and why they work, just enough to get you rolling down the road.

Interest in Ruby stems from the popularity of Rails, the web development framework that's attracting new devotees and refugees from Java and PHP. But there are plenty of other uses for this versatile language. The best way to learn is to just try the code! You'll find examples on nearly every page of this book that you can imitate and hack. Briefly, this book:

• Outlines many of the most important features of Ruby
• Demonstrates how to use conditionals, and how to manipulate strings in Ruby. Includes a section on regular expressions
• Describes how to use operators, basic math, functions from the Math module, rational numbers, etc.
• Talks you through Ruby arrays, and demonstrates hashes in detail
• Explains how to process files with Ruby
• Discusses Ruby classes and modules (mixins) in detail, including a brief introduction to object-oriented programming (OOP)
• Introduces processing XML, the Tk toolkit, RubyGems, reflection, RDoc, embedded Ruby, metaprogramming, exception handling, and other topics
• Acquaints you with some of the essentials of Rails, and includes a short Rails tutorial.

Michael Fitzgerald is Principal at Overdue Books LLC, a publishing and writing firm. He is the author of Learning Ruby, Ruby Pocket Reference, XML Pocket Reference, Third Edition with Simon St. Laurent, XML Hacks, and Learning XSLT, all published by O'Reilly. He is also the author of Building B2B Applications with XML: A Resource Guide and XSL Essentials (both by John Wiley & Sons). His books have been translated into Spanish, French, German, Japanese, and Chinese. He has also been a regular contributor to XML.com. Michael likes to ski (downhill and cross country), ride and train horses, and spend time with his family.