Minibook

Mr. Neighborly's Humble Little Ruby Book

Posted by Jeremy McAnally on Jan 28, 2007

Community: Ruby
Topics: Programming ,; Dynamic Languages
Tags: Language Features

Ruby has taken the programming world by storm. With the slow decline of Java and the catalyst of Rails, it has risen to become one of the most popular programming languages, rising to #10 on the TIOBE index and winning their "Programming Language of the Year" award.

Mr. Neighborly's Humble Little Ruby Book is a book about this fine language, but it is not a language book per se. It is perhaps best described as a mix between your favorite novel, your favorite Spanish textbook, and a Richard Simmons exercise video: it walks you through the very basics of working with Ruby, but by the end of it, you'll no doubt be
sweatin' it to the oldies. It covers the base syntax of the language, including working with values, flow control, and object oriented programming, into some of the library functionality of Ruby, such as databases, web services, and string manipulation.

Expect this book to rock your world. Or at least teach you a programming language.

144 pages, 6"x9"

Free download, buy the print version for $9.95

If you enjoyed reading the free downloadable version, please support the author as well as future InfoQ books by purchasing the print copy for only $9.95, or: Login to download this book FREE (PDF)

1 Welcome to Ruby
Basic Concepts of Ruby
Types in Ruby
Collections
Variables and the Like

2 Break it down now!
Methods
Blocks and Proc Objects
Modules
Files

3 Hustle and flow (control)
Conditionals
Loops
Exceptions

4 The System Beneath
Filesystem Interaction
Threads and Forks and Processes
Environment variables, command line
Win32 and Beyond

5 Looking Beyond Home
Networking and the Web
It's Like Distributed or Something...
Data my base, please!

6 It's a Library!
String Manipulation
Date/Time
Hashing and Cryptography
Unit testing

Appendix A Links and the Like
Appendix B High Performance Ruby with C/C++

Author Bio

Jeremy McAnally is a husband, developer, author, college student, and aspiring panda trainer who resides in Knoxville, TN with his wife. He enjoys working with Rails, Ruby, and Indian food. He recently penned this book and currently working on another book with Manning Publications titled Ruby in Practice. You can find him at http://www.jeremymcanally.com/, which links to his projects and blogs.