Beginning Ruby: From Novice To Professional

There are two mighty tomes of Ruby programming which every serious Ruby programmer should own. One is Programming Ruby: The Pragmatic Programmer’s Guide (often called ‘pickaxe book’ due to its cover picture) and, my own favourite, Hal Fulton’s The Ruby Way.

Valuable as those books may be, neither makes easy reading for the newcomer to Ruby. Programming Ruby is great as a reference but not so good as a tutorial. The Ruby Way is better as a tutorial but a little uncompromising for anyone unfamiliar with ‘pure’ OOP and dynamic languages (though if you already know Smalltalk and/or Python/Perl, it’s probably the perfect choice). For complete programming novices, Chris Pine’s Learn To Program provides a gentle introduction which, however, won’t take you beyond the basics.

When I was learning Ruby what I really wanted was a well-structured book that began with the assumption that I already knew how to program and then guided me quickly through the special features of Ruby. At the time such a book did not exist. Now, with the publication of Peter Cooper’s ‘Beginning Ruby’, it does.

In just over 600 pages, Cooper leads the reader quickly through the shallows of Ruby programming (variables, classes, methods, modules et al) before diving into deeper waters: dynamic programming, using the Windows API, file handling, databases, Internet development and a basic introduction to Ruby’s ‘killer app’, the Rails web development framework.

The book is well written, nicely laid out, the explanations are clear and the code examples are useful. In short, if you already have some programming experience and want an accessible introduction to the world of Ruby, this is the book to get.