Beginning Ruby: From Novice to Professional (Expert's Voice in Open Source)

Beginning Ruby is a thoroughly contemporary guide to this powerful object-oriented language. It's one of the only guides aimed at both the novice programmer as well as experienced developers who are new to Ruby. The book starts by explaining the principles behind object oriented programming and within a few chapters builds towards creating a genuine Ruby application. The book then explains key Ruby principles, such as classes and objects; projects, modules and libraries; and other aspects of Ruby such as database access.

In addition, Ruby on Rails is covered in some depth and the book's appendixes provide essential and long-lasting reference information.