Rating: 
Summary: Quick and effective introduction to Ruby
Review: The authors have a wonderful style for introducting the lanaguage Ruby, assuming that you have at least a small amount of prior programming experience. The order of presentation and the amount of polish throughout made this a joy to read and introduces Ruby at a very rapid, yet comfortable, pace.It does seem to suffer from wanting to be both an introduction to Ruby and a reference manual as well; the last several chapters look (and read like) reference materials. While I'm not opposed to that, the book doesn't have the kind of binding that lets it easily lay flat on your desk open to the page, so I'm more inclined to just open the docs on a separate monitor instead. The book might as well have been lighter and just had a pointer to docs online. Also, I wonder if some of the presentations of concepts like closures and contiuations aren't a bit too rapid for the casual reader. If you've had a programming background in Scheme or Lisp, it's old hat; however, as I was reading through their presentations and the relatively quick examples, it felt likely that many readers wouldn't get a lot of the subtelty in what was going on under the hood to make the language features work or in what kinds of real world scenarios those sorts of features are useful.
Rating: 
Summary: A excellent introduction and beginner's reference
Review: This book is an excellent into to a very easy to use language. Ruby is much more OO than any language except Smalltalk and is much better integrated with standard UNIX/POSIX than that language. Now all we need is a reference for all the libraries and a book on XP/Rapid Development using Ruby (and the latter is what the current authors say they're working on next, although they don't explicitly mention XP that I noticed). I give this book my highest recommendation, it is one of the best books I have read of its type (language intro). As for Ruby, if you are thinking about learning a language and want to do OO for anything except systems and embedded programming, then this is the language to look at. (for systems and embedded, OO is probably not a good idea in most cases anyhow... object-based is about the highest you'd want to go.)
Rating: 
Summary: This books is also available online
Review: This is a good introduction to the Ruby language. You can decide if you want to buy it or not by first reading the online version at http://www.pragmaticprogrammer.com
Rating:
Summary: Great Introduction
Review: This is a great Introduction to Ruby. However, I would appreciate an update that includes instruction/examples on using databases and more web examples -- especially persistence and ssl. This is probably because this seems to be the very first book published on Ruby and probably many of these modules weren't written yet. This book has an excellent reference section too. If the authors decide to update the book -- which I strongly recommend, I will buy a copy. Since Ruby is still a young and evolving language -- maybe they will write yearly editions and I will be glad to subscribe to this book's yearly editions.
Rating:
Summary: Great Introduction
Review: This is a great Introduction to Ruby. However, I would appreciate an update that includes instruction/examples on using databases and more web examples -- especially persistence and ssl. This is probably because this seems to be the very first book published on Ruby and probably many of these modules weren't written yet. This book has an excellent reference section too. If the authors decide to update the book -- which I strongly recommend, I will buy a copy. Since Ruby is still a young and evolving language -- maybe they will write yearly editions and I will be glad to subscribe to this book's yearly editions.
Rating:
Summary: Write code for the 21st century
Review: This is a sweet book. The first edition got me hooked on Ruby; this edition is even better. Explaining a programming language can be a tough task. The authors do an outstanding job of presenting both the gory details and the elegant underpinnings of the language.
Ruby is more accessible and easier to pick up than Python, Perl, or Java, with a cleaner, more intuitive design. The book will get into the language, guide you through syntax and style, and leave with good language comprehension.
The reference section can, at times, be a bit terse, but the due to the number of libraries that are built in to the language, a certain amount of brevity is required to keep the book to a manageable size. Distributed computing? Built in. XML parsing? Built in. HTTP server? Built in. Hell, you could almost write amazon.com in Ruby and never need a 3rd-party lib.
Get the book, and write code for the 21st century.
Rating:
Summary: Fun to read
Review: This is an easy-to-read introduction to a really clean, usable scripting language that offers a stunningly productive experience. The book is well-laid out, the authors seem authoritative.
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Summary: Great Book For Starting To Learn Ruby
Review: This is my choice for "first" Ruby book. I have two other Ruby books, including "The Ruby Way", which I also love, but the "Dave & Andy Book" was my choice for starting out learning the language and writing my first programs. The Ruby Way is probably the next book - loaded with great algorithms you can jump right into when you know exactly what you're looking for - but I really like this book better for language basics. Ruby is a beautiful language, and this book shows it. It will get you started fast, and you will keep coming back to it later when you want to gain deeper understanding of basic things like Ruby classes and OO, variables, iterators, etc.
Rating:
Summary: Best book on Ruby
Review: This is the best book on Ruby, bar none. Far and away better than Ruby in a Nutshell, which is too terse to be useful. The introductory section provides a smooth ramp into learning Ruby, and the reference section in the back is so good that it's literally dog eared to the point of falling apart in my version. You can get this online for free, but if you are serious about learning Ruby (and you should be, because it's a great language), you should buy this book.
Rating:
Summary: A real page turner
Review: Well I have been up all night long reading 'Programming Ruby' cover to cover. I've been thinking about getting into Ruby programming for a while now, but lack of documentation and lack of time has always stopped me. However, after reading this book I am thoroughly hooked on Ruby. Not only does the book have an excellent tutorial which goes over major Ruby concepts and the majority of the language you will encounter on a daily basis, but it also has an indispensable language and standard library reference, as well as an overview of the C API and details on the inner workings of the Ruby interpreter. This book is definitely worth picking up if you want to start dabbling in Ruby, and is almost a requirement to have on your desk during heavy hacking sessions.
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