From: Robert Klemme <shortcutter@...>
Date: 2009-03-01T01:14:04+09:00
Subject: Re: Ruby in a Nutshell

On 28.02.2009 17:02, Tim Hunter wrote:
> Jeff Schwab wrote:
>> I'm thinking of buying & reading Ruby in a Nutshell (O'Reilly, 2001), 
>> but am concerned that it may be outdated.  The stable version at the 
>> time of publication was Ruby 1.6.  Is this still worth the investment?
>>
>> I'm really looking for an extremely concise, but in-depth guide to Ruby. 
>>  I own (and have read) the Pick Axe and The Ruby Way, but neither of 
>> them are really what I want.  I'm concerned with the mechanics, syntax, 
>> and libraries, but most of the books (and lupine cartoons, however 
>> amusing) just seem to be cursory love letters of the form "look at all 
>> this cool stuff you can do with Ruby!"  That's great, but it's not what 
>> I need right now.
> 
> You want _The_Ruby_Programming_Language_, by David Flanagan & Yukihiro 
> Matsumoto, O'Reilly, 2008. It describes Ruby 1.8 and some Ruby 1.9. At 
> 400+ pages, it's in-depth but hardly what I'd call "concise."

Jeff, IMHO the upcoming book by David A. Black could be for you - 
although it is not short either.  But it covers 1.9:

http://www.manning.com/black2/

An then there's the material which can be found online:
http://www.ruby-doc.org/gettingstarted

Kind regards

	robert