Rating: 
Summary: Excellent book, except...
Review: ...it's a little bit boring, I thought. Most of the book seems to be saying, "You are probably used to doing this in one way, here is the Ruby way of doing it." This is in stark contrast to the Perl philosophy, "There's more than one way to do it." Since Perl seems to be Ruby's main competitor, it seems like the most important thing to remember is that they have very different philosophies. Of course, you can write Ruby code using a lot of different styles, however there definately is a "Ruby style", and that is what is pushed by this book.
Rating: 
Summary: Helpful even for experienced programmers
Review: Because of the lack of adequate Ruby documentation in English (which is currently improving but may still be a ways off), this book is indispensable as a Ruby reference and as "best practice" tutorial for the language. Because of the way Ruby is designed, most programmers will find that they need to change their style a little in order to best take advantage of its features. This book helps you understand how to do this and gives you a good overall knowledge of Ruby's vast capabilities.
Rating:
Summary: One of the better language books out there
Review: Dave and Andrew have done it again. It was a pleasure using this book to learn Ruby, which at the time had no other published books out on it and the online documentation was poor at best. This made it worth it. Far better than most I've read (and I have a LOT of nerd-books). It is nice having some good books out there that aren't of O'Reilly's usual level of quality. This one blows them away.
Rating:
Summary: A great book about a great language!!
Review: Gee, why didn't anyone else write a pure OO scripting language like Ruby?? :-)Like most really great languages (I am thinking of Collishaw's Rexx, but there are others), Ruby was one person's dream, carefully nurtured over a period of time, and it emerges from development bearing the stamp of one person's ideas. It is unlike any other language (of course), but, along with Rexx, it is EXTREMELY easy to learn. I finished most of the book in one 3-day weekend, and easily translated an existing small Java application to Ruby on the third day. I LOVE THIS LANGUAGE, and I predict SIGNIFICANT Ruby growth over the next five years. As the authors remark, Perl tends to encourage you to "hack out scripts," while Ruby encourages you to design an elegant solution.
Rating:
Summary: Fun Reading
Review: I am not sure the world really needs another programming language and doubtful that this one will go very far. But, as a book, if you are interested in programming for its own sake, this one is great! Very well written and organized, just long enough to be thorough without getting bored. As I think the authors noted elsewhere, its a good idea to periodically learn new languages, just to prevent from getting in a rut and so forth. I can't say I exactly learned a new language from my reading of this book, but it does make you question some of your assumptions and ways of looking at things which is usually a good thing. In a similar vein, there are some books about there about C# which I doubt i will ever actually use, but make for fascinating reading.
Rating:
Summary: Two days with this book and I'm writing gobs of Ruby code.
Review: I am very pleased with this book. The pragmatic programmers have made this a very easy and fun book to read. They present Ruby in a delightful manner, making it very easy to assimilate. I was also quite pleased with the depth and breadth of the book. The initial tutorial does not just gloss over the libraries. Rather, it gives you minor examples showing how to use most of them, and then leads to the library documentation in the back of the book. It's a very effective technique. After two days with this book I was writing apps that query websites, manipulating html with regular expressions, maintaining persistent object stores, etc. Both the language, and the book are very very powerful. I heartily recommend this book to anyone interested in Ruby.
Rating:
Summary: Two days with this book and I'm writing gobs of Ruby code.
Review: I am very pleased with this book. The pragmatic programmers have made this a very easy and fun book to read. They present Ruby in a delightful manner, making it very easy to assimilate. I was also quite pleased with the depth and breadth of the book. The initial tutorial does not just gloss over the libraries. Rather, it gives you minor examples showing how to use most of them, and then leads to the library documentation in the back of the book. It's a very effective technique. After two days with this book I was writing apps that query websites, manipulating html with regular expressions, maintaining persistent object stores, etc. Both the language, and the book are very very powerful. I heartily recommend this book to anyone interested in Ruby.
Rating:
Summary: A skeptical review
Review: I bought the book, based upon the enthusiastic reviews here. It's not bad (though probably not worth 5 stars). The first 275 pages provide a fairly well written introduction to the language, followed by 350 pages of a so-so reference guide. (For example, pp. 166-169 give an example of using Rube for creating OLE clients and promises that the reference section "describes the class in detail." However, the reference section consists of one line descriptions of the class methods and an example taken from the distribution with no further comments. Not exactly helpful.) I was expecting to like the language--advertised as a more object-oriented version of Python--but was rather disappointed. The syntax, at least for someone from a C/C++/Java background, is unusual and occasionally cryptic. The choice of some keywords is odd and inconsistent (to_s converts to a string, elsewhere you get Pascal-type naming conventions, e.g. deleteFirst). There are some nice features, such as closures, but it lacks the huge library of Java or the easy accessability of Python.
Rating:
Summary: Can't make up your mind between SmallTalk and Python?
Review: I got ahold of this book, after deciding it was high time to learn a new language. I was tired of C++ and Java, and started peeking at SmallTalk and Python. Being less than enthusiastic about both, I delayed until a friend mentioned Ruby. "Sigh. YASL!(Yet-Another-Scripting-Language)" was my first thought, but upon closer inspection I found it to be the kind of middle ground I wanted. The book is great as an introductory read. It briefly passes thru and mentions all aspects, slowing down on the more important ones, and covers alot of ground on a more light note. As a reference and indepth study, it is less useful, but this is more due to the young age of the Ruby language and libraries, than a failure of the book. Both the language and the book make for excellent brainfeed.
Rating:
Summary: A nice fun book for programmers
Review: I guess non-programmers can read this book with benefit but having some programming background will help in appreciating the power of this language. The authors do a good job of going through Ruby's syntax and features while using OO principles to buildup on a non-trivial tutorial app. If you're a Perl/Python programmer, this book will get you up to speed quickly.
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