Ruby has gained some attention through the popular Ruby on Rails web development
framework, but the language alone is worthy of more consideration -- a lot more.
This book offers a definition explanation of this powerful and extremely
flexible language, which draws inspiration from Lisp, Smalltalk and Perl, but
uses a grammar that's easy for C and Java programmers to learn. With The Ruby
Programming Language, you will quickly learn your way around versions 1.8 and
1.9, and discover why this pure object-oriented language is also suitable for
procedural and functional programming styles. You'll learn Ruby's lexical
structure, primary expressions, conditionals, syntax, classes, the data it
manipulates, and