Fitzgerald - Learning Ruby

Generally, I figure two kinds of readers will buy this book: experienced programmers who want to learn Ruby, and new programmers who want to learn to program. I have the interesting job of catering to both while trying not to tick off either. It's a balancing act, and this is how I'll handle it: I am going to address you as if you are already a competent programmer, but I'll also provide plenty of help for beginners, mostly in the form of notes or sidebars. I'll let you know when you can skip a section if you are already a heavy hitter.

If you're a fairly experienced programmer, you might just want to read the code examples first, from the beginning of the book to the end, skimming the explanations surrounding the examples as needed. You should be able to see what's going on fairly quickly just by keeping your eyes on the code. The code is laid out in a more or less logical fashion (to me at least), so you should be able to figure out Ruby in fairly short order. If you are new to programming, I have attempted to make your job a little easier by explaining things as I go along.

Do you have to know everything about a car before you start driving? Did you have to know anything about fuel injection, combustion, or timing belts to drive? Of course not.

It's the same with programming in a new language. I am going to show you lots of Ruby programs, many of them just one-liners, and then tell you how and why they workjust enough to get you rolling down the road. I take this approach because I believe we do most of our learning by observing, imitating, and playing. I plan to do a lot of that in this book.

You should know up front that this is a just-get-in-and-drive book. In other words, you can drive a car even if you don't know whether its got six or eight cylinders.

David Heinemeier Hansson, inventor of Ruby on Rails, said something I like: "People learn by changing a little thing, reloading, and seeing the change." He's right on. That's my experience: over the years I have learned more by hacking code than by reading about it.

I also move as quickly as possible, not getting bogged down in the quicksand of details. The details will come in time, as they are needed; the main thing I want to give you now is forward movement and momentum.

If you just follow along with what I'm doing, running the programs and altering them to your taste, you'll learn quickly. The more you run these programs, the more fluency you'll develop, and before long, you'll start thinking and even dreaming in Ruby. Then you'll just take off on your own.

The latest stable version at the time I am writing this is 1.8.6. That's the version I'll be using. You can probably get along using an older version, but unless you have 1.8.6 or later installed, I can't guarantee that all the programs in this book will work as advertised, though they most likely will.