• Author: Huw Collingbourne
• Format: archived PDF
• Price: free

The Book Of Ruby (free edition) is a free tutorial to the Ruby language. It contains 425 pages in 20 chapters. It is provided in the form of a PDF document in which each chapter is accompanied by ready-to-run source code for all the examples. There is also an Introduction which explains how to use the source code in Ruby In Steel or any other editor/IDE of your choice plus appendices and an index.

Note that The Book Of Ruby is an in-depth guide to Ruby. For a much simpler guide to the principal features of the Ruby language, there is also the free eBook, The Little Book Of Ruby, by the same author.

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• Author: Huw Collingbourne
• Format: PDF
• Price: free

The Little Book Of Ruby is a PDF eBook which will guide you through the fundamentals of Ruby programming. Starting with the basics (strings, numbers, objects and methods) it quickly moves on to explain all you need to know to create your own class hierarchies, use arrays, hashes, iterators, modules, mixins and much more besides.

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• Author: Neil Smyth
• Format: online HTML
• Price: free

Ruby Essentials is a free on-line book designed to provide a concise and easy to follow guide to learning Ruby. Everything from installing Ruby and the basics of the language through to topics such as arrays, file handling and object-oriented programming are covered, all combined with easy to understand code examples which serve to bridge the gap between theory and practice.

Ruby Essentials is intended to be of equal use both to those experienced in other programming languages and to novices who have chosen Ruby as their “first programming language”.

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• Author: Dan Nguyen
• Format: online HTML
• Price: free

The Bastards Book of Ruby is an introduction to programming and its practical uses for journalists, researchers, scientists, analysts, and anyone else whose job is to seek out, make sense from, and show the hard-to-find data.

This does not require being “good at computers”, having a background in programming, or the desire (yet) to be a full-fledged hacker/developer. It just takes an eagerness to be challenged.

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• Author: Zed A. Shaw
• Format: online HTML
• Price: free

In Learn Ruby the Hard Way, Third Edition , you’ll learn Ruby by working through 52 brilliantly crafted exercises. Read them. Type their code precisely. (No copying and pasting!) Fix your mistakes. Watch the programs run. As you do, you’ll learn how software works; what good programs look like; how to read, write, and think about code; and how to find and fix your mistakes using tricks professional programmers use.

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• Author: Gregory Brown
• Format: online HTML, PDF
• Price: free

How do you write truly elegant code with Ruby? Ruby Best Practices is for programmers who want to use Ruby as experienced Rubyists do. Written by the developer of the Ruby project Prawn, this concise book explains how to design beautiful APIs and domain-specific languages with Ruby, as well as how to work with functional programming ideas and techniques that can simplify your code and make you more productive. You’ll learn how to write code that’s readable, expressive, and much more.

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• Author: Wikibooks
• Format: online HTML, PDF
• Price: free

The book is currently broken down into several sections and is intended to be read sequentially. Getting started will show how to install and get started with Ruby in your environment. Basic Ruby demonstrates the main features of the language syntax. The Ruby language section is organized like a reference to the language. Available modules covers some of the standard library. Intermediate Ruby covers a selection of slightly more advanced topics. Each section is designed to be self contained. The book is a work in progress and is subject to change.

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• Author: Jason Kim
• Format: online HTML
• Price: free

The book has two main objectives.

Introduce important topics in Ruby as quickly as possible
Ramp up problem solving skills to tackle real world problems
The book has two kinds of audiences in mind.

Absolute beginners who do not have any programming experience
Experienced programmers who have programmed in other languages such as C, C++ and Java
The book isn’t aimed at seasoned Ruby programmers. Most of the topics covered by the book will be familiar to programmers who work primarily with Ruby. It might serve a different purpose for Ruby programmers as a refresher.

While the book will cover wide varieties of topics in Ruby language and its ecosystem, it should not be considered as an exhaustive reference.

The book is still in the beta stage. It contains errors and the structure of the book will change over time.

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• Author: Bozhidar Batsov
• Format: online HTML, archived HTML
• Price: free

This Ruby style guide recommends best practices so that real-world Ruby programmers can write code that can be maintained by other real-world Ruby programmers. A style guide that reflects real-world usage gets used, and a style guide that holds to an ideal that has been rejected by the people it is supposed to help risks not getting used at all – no matter how good it is.

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• Author: Minero Aoki, Translated by Vincent Isambart and Clifford Escobar Caoile
• Format: online HTML
• Price: free

This book explores several themes with the following goals in mind: To have knowledge of the structure of ruby, To gain knowledge about language processing systems in general, To acquire skills in reading source code.

Ruby is an object-oriented language developed by Yukihiro Matsumoto. The official implementation of the Ruby language is called ruby. It is actively developed and maintained by the open source community. Our first goal is to understand the inner-workings of the ruby implementation. This book is going to investigate ruby as a whole.

Secondly, by knowing about the implementation of Ruby, we will be able to know about other language processing systems. This book tries to cover all topics necessary for implementing a language, such as hash table, scanner and parser, evaluation procedure, and many others. Because this book is not intended as a text book, going through entire areas and ideas without any lack was not reasonable. However the parts relating to the essential structures of a language implementation are adequately explained. And a brief summary of Ruby language itself is also included so that readers who don’t know about Ruby can read this book.

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