From: John Joyce Date: 2007-06-13T08:50:15+09:00 Subject: Re: Ruby Beginner Books Ruby is definitely the best way to do OOP conceptually, because everything (almost) is already an object. but, you can still just hammer out short functional or procedural code as you please. In this order: Learn to Program, the Chris Pine book, if you are an absolute beginner with no knowledge of programming. you won't get deep into anything with it though. Beginning Ruby, the Peter Cooper book, this is definitely the next step. Some concepts will be completely new for you, that's ok, they don't go too deep, just getting you used to lots of different available things to do with Ruby. Everyday Scripting with Ruby, this one should probably come next. Maybe even before doing some of the last chapters of Peter's book. The exercises here are really designed to take you to the next level and make you understand things without hurting you. There is also a wonderful glossary in the back. Well, heck, it's a Pragmatic Programmers production! After these, you should be ready to tackle a lot more stuff. All the while, you should have the Pickaxe handy as a reference and casual toilet browsing. It really does contain the nitty gritty on a lot of stuff you will eventually ask about. It's not a great tutorial though. In addition, you should consider the Ruby Cookbook, the Ruby Way, and any of the Rails books out there, you can learn a lot of cool tricks from the Rails stuff that carries over back to other Ruby. If you get into Rails, you will also need, but should probably have anyway, an SQL or MySQL book. Not a big one, necessarily. The little purple phrasebook will do fine, and David Black's, Ruby for Rails book teaches you almost all the MySQL you will need. After that you can pick up more SQL if you feel you need it.