# \[ANN\] The Book Of Ruby - Free eBook **URL:** \ **Category:** Ruby\ **Created:** [May 15, 2008, 3:23pm UTC](https://www.ruby-forum.com/t/ann-the-book-of-ruby-free-ebook/137705 "2008-05-15T15:23:00Z")\ **Posts on this page:** 4\ **Page:** 1
**Author:** ![huw](https://www.ruby-forum.com/letter_avatar_proxy/v4/letter/h/e19adc/32.png) [@huw](https://www.ruby-forum.com/u/huw)\ **Post date:** [May 15, 2008, 3:23pm UTC](https://www.ruby-forum.com/t/ann-the-book-of-ruby-free-ebook/137705/1 "2008-05-15T15:23:00Z")
As some of you may know, a couple of years ago, I wrote a free Ruby eBook called The Little Book Of Ruby. This has been downloaded many tens of thousands of times in English and an unknown number of times in translation. The Little Book Of Ruby is a short (10 chapter, 87 page) eBook that covers the fundamentals of Ruby programming The Little Book now has a big brother called simply The Book Of Ruby. This will eventually run to over 400 pages in 20 chapters and it goes into considerable depth - covering both the well-known and the not so-well-known features of the Ruby language. The Book Of Ruby will be published online one chapter at a time in PDF format. Each chapter will come with lots of ready-to-run sample programs. The first chapter went online today. The remaining 19 chapters will be put online over the next few months. Oh, it’s free, by the way 😉 Download chapter One (and sample code): [http://www.sapphiresteel.com/The-Book-Of-Ruby](http://www.sapphiresteel.com/The-Book-Of-Ruby) Also, The Little Book Of Ruby: [http://www.sapphiresteel.com/The-Little-Book-Of-Ruby](http://www.sapphiresteel.com/The-Little-Book-Of-Ruby) More info: [http://www.sapphiresteel.com/The-Book-Of-Ruby-free-in-depth](http://www.sapphiresteel.com/The-Book-Of-Ruby-free-in-depth) best wishes Huw C. SapphireSteel Software Ruby and Rails In Visual Studio [http://www.sapphiresteel.com](http://www.sapphiresteel.com) ---
**Author:** ![huw](https://www.ruby-forum.com/letter_avatar_proxy/v4/letter/h/e19adc/32.png) [@huw](https://www.ruby-forum.com/u/huw)\ **Post date:** [May 15, 2008, 6:04pm UTC](https://www.ruby-forum.com/t/ann-the-book-of-ruby-free-ebook/137705/2 "2008-05-15T18:04:30Z")
> This will eventually run to over 400 pages in 20 chapters and it goes > into considerable depth - covering both the well-known and the not > so-well-known features of the Ruby language. I wouldn’t consider myself as an expert at all (even though I have spent a lot of time with ruby), but my question is: Do you think that the book is useful to intermediate rubyistas as well? ---
**Author:** ![huw](https://www.ruby-forum.com/letter_avatar_proxy/v4/letter/h/e19adc/32.png) [@huw](https://www.ruby-forum.com/u/huw)\ **Post date:** [May 15, 2008, 6:25pm UTC](https://www.ruby-forum.com/t/ann-the-book-of-ruby-free-ebook/137705/3 "2008-05-15T18:25:17Z")
-----BEGIN PGP SIGNED MESSAGE----- Hash: SHA1 Marc H. wrote: |\> This will eventually run to over 400 pages in 20 chapters and it goes |\> into considerable depth - covering both the well-known and the not |\> so-well-known features of the Ruby language. | | I wouldn’t consider myself as an expert at all (even though I have spent | a lot of time with ruby), but my question is: | | Do you think that the book is useful to intermediate rubyistas as well? Rubyists, please. Or Jewel Cutters if you are into obscure stuff. No snakes on a plane here. 😛 Anyway: If the book goes as much in depth as Huw promises, I certainly think it’ll be useful for intermediates like you and me, too, especially if it diverges from the well trodden path we usually take. 'sides: It’s free, so taking a look won’t hurt, and only cost you time. 😉 I certainly plan on doing that once I have the time. * * * Phillip G. Twitter: [twitter.com/cynicalryan](http://twitter.com/cynicalryan) Blog: [http://justarubyist.blogspot.com](http://justarubyist.blogspot.com) Use the fundamental control flow constructs. ~ - The Elements of Programming Style (Kernighan & Plaugher) -----BEGIN PGP SIGNATURE----- Version: GnuPG v1.4.8 (MingW32) Comment: Using GnuPG with Mozilla - [http://enigmail.mozdev.org](http://enigmail.mozdev.org) iEYEARECAAYFAkgsY4UACgkQbtAgaoJTgL+eEQCfbhC4QL1rncNeUCzTTadMt88B nUcAni4aQjsUDUydwuHs93KoqnD8sNMr =UFeQ -----END PGP SIGNATURE----- ---
**Author:** ![huw](https://www.ruby-forum.com/letter_avatar_proxy/v4/letter/h/e19adc/32.png) [@huw](https://www.ruby-forum.com/u/huw)\ **Post date:** [May 15, 2008, 6:46pm UTC](https://www.ruby-forum.com/t/ann-the-book-of-ruby-free-ebook/137705/4 "2008-05-15T18:46:13Z")
Just to clarify the ‘level’… while it starts right at the beginning (‘hello world’), The Book Of Ruby moves fairly rapidly onto topics that could be categorized as ‘intermediate to advanced’. Also, from chapter 2 onwards, each chapter comes with a section called ‘Digging Deeper’. In this section I will often go into some of the more arcane reaches of Ruby - things that even fairly experienced Ruby programmers may not know about. The only reason _I_ know about some of these is that we have had to provide deep support for Ruby in our IDE, and that means that we have had to deal with all kinds of ‘special cases’ in order to get our Intellisense, debugging etc. to work correctly and reliably. As a consequence, I have spent a lot of time exploring the ‘outer reaches’ of Ruby. The book will cover all the main subject areas: OOP, blocks, mixins, regex, exception handling, singletons, threads, loops and iterators, scoping, IO, dynamic (meta)programming etc. etc. If anyone has any questions or wants to open up the discussion on specific subjects, please feel free either to comment on the blog or to join the forum and start threads in the Ruby section: [http://sapphiresteel.com/forum/](http://sapphiresteel.com/forum/) best wishes Huw SapphireSteel Software Ruby and Rails In Visual Studio [http://www.sapphiresteel.com](http://www.sapphiresteel.com)