The PickAxe: Programming Ruby

Absolutely the Ruby book to get is Programming Ruby 1.9 & 2.0, The Pragmatic Programmers’ Guide by Dave Thomas and others (from the Pragmatic Bookshelf).^[1] Although I highly recommend picking up the fourth edition of this excellent book, which covers all of Ruby 1.9 and 2.0, you can also get an older (but still mostly relevant) version for free online.

You can find just about everything about Ruby, from the basic to the advanced, in this book. It’s easy to read, it’s comprehensive, and it’s just about perfect. I wish every language had a book of this quality. At the back of the book, you’ll find a huge section detailing every method in every class, explaining it and giving examples. (This is where you really want the fourth edition.) I just love this book!

You can get it from a number of places (including the Pragmatic Programmers’ own site). My favorite place for the free first edition is http://ruby-doc.org/. That version has a nice table of contents on the side, as well as an index. (ruby-doc.org has lots of other great documentation as well, such as for the Core API and Standard Library…basically, it documents everything Ruby comes with right out of the box. Check it out.)

And why is it called the PickAxe? Well, there’s a picture of a pickaxe on the cover of the book. It’s a silly name, I guess, but it stuck.