programming ruby
Tired of hearing Ruby being mentioned all over the place for the past two years or so, I finally decided to give it a shot. Overall, I'm impressed. I feel a lot more comfortable with it for writing administrator-type scripts than I do with Python -- this is mostly from the Perl-inspired features of Ruby. And where Perl programming starts to get weird -- like with Objects -- Ruby handles this just as easily as Python does. So basically, we're looking at a language that takes the best features of Perl and Python and mixes them together.
Now you can learn quite a bit about Ruby by starting out with some tutorials then jumping to the API reference over at Ruby-Doc, but it's always nice to have a hard-copy reference available. This is where Programming Ruby comes in. The first section is a dive-right-in style tutorial that teaches you all about the language. Part two is another tutorial, but takes the start-from-the-bottom approach. Finally, the last section is a printed API reference that always comes in hand.
With all the talk about Ruby and Rails these days, there's no reason why you shouldn't give this language a try. Though there are some downsides to it (just do a google search and you'll find many pages talking about them), the ease and speed with which you can program with this language do a good job at making up for them.
9/10
