The Little Book of Ruby

Author : Huw Collingbourne, in association with Rosedown Mill Ltd. and Bitwise Magazine
Publisher : Dark Neon Ltd.
Publication Date : June 2006

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Excerpts from the Introduction:

Ruby is a cross-platform interpreted language which has many features in common with other 'scripting' languages such as Perl and Python. However, its version of object orientation is more thorough than those languages and, in many respects, it has more in common with the great-granddaddy of 'pure' OOP languages, Smalltalk. The Ruby language was created by Yukihiro Matsumoto (commonly known as 'Matz') and it was first released in 1995.

What Is Rails?

Currently much of the excitement surrounding Ruby can be attributed to a web development framework called Rails – popularly known as 'Ruby On Rails'. While Rails is an impressive framework, it is not the be-all and end-all of Ruby. Indeed, if you decide to leap right into Rails development without first mastering Ruby, you may find that you end up with an application that you don't even understand. While the Little Book of Ruby won't cover the special features of Rails, it will give you the grounding you need to understand Rails code and write your own Rails applications.

How To Use This Book:

This book is a step-by-step tutorial to programming in Ruby and you can follow it chapter by chapter, reading the text and running the sample programs. On the other hand, if you prefer to 'dip in', you may want to try out some of the programs in whichever order takes your fancy; then refer back to the text for explanations. There are no monolithic applications in this book – just small, self-contained sample programs – so it’s easy to skip from chapter to chapter if you wish...

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