Programming Ruby 1.9 & 2.0: The Pragmatic Programmers' Guide (The Facets of Ruby)

Very detailed reference book. This is a must have for every rails developer, but if you are a complete beginner, this book will likely not give the guidance needed unless the person already has strong OOO skills from other languages. If you are new to programming, this book will be useful - but not the best starting point as it is a reference guide and not a guide to teach someone how to program and about OOO.

This is a solid, comprehensive and accessible tutorial on programming Ruby.Maybe not all you need, but enough to let you make a better determination of just what "all you need" actually means in your case.It's not cheap, but is well worth the price if you are willing to put in the work.

This book is centered around snippet code so if you are looking for a cookbook start to finish project book this is not for you. The good side of this story is I have it loaded on my work computer. When I have syntax issues I simply perform a find on the subject. this has proven to be a very productive when working. Between stackoverflow the open community web source, and this book when coding I solve problems quickly. I am a professional Ruby / Ruby on Rails developer. For all those who just know Ruby on Rails you should really learn Ruby. What happens if one of your gems does not work? or gets monkey patched? or just doesn't work? You will be forced to dig deeper and you will need to know Ruby to sort out the R-on-R MVC framework guts.Trust me I tried just learning Rails years ago, now I know Ruby I am very seldom defeated. If you like this comment get the book GREAT resource.

This book provides thorough yet concise coverage of the Ruby language and its standard library. The basic concepts of the language are covered in a few brief chapters, and from there the main focus is on practical real-world use. That is certainly worth every penny.

I needed to learn Ruby in hurry, as there was an urgent need to rewrite a module that was giving trouble in Perl because of a problematic CPAN module. This book gave me all I needed to quickly learn the language and rewrite the module in Ruby.

Easily the best programming book I've bought. It has a great writing style, it's formatted perfectly, and it covers just about everything you'd ever need to know about Ruby. Why can't there be more of these books?

This book is everything you (and I ) need to know about Ruby and programming computers. Easy to read, nice and clean code and the topics included covers pretty much everything you need to know about. But i would not recommend for beginners.

The "official" Ruby book. This is a good book, but I didn't really like the way ruby was divided up into a couple of different sections covering the same topics. Also it could be half as long really. The reference in the back is not useful to me. I would rather look up this detailed language reference on the web at the ruby docs site. The extra thickness makes the physical book harder to hold and read.