Rating:  - a very good introduction to Ruby - and to programming
Cooper's book is by far the best introduction to Ruby I've read as well as to programming in general for beginners. He strikes (for me, at least) the right balance of showing how-to as well as the rationale behind it. It is neither too shallow nor overbearing, but steadily builds on previous lessons, always careful to point out where to find further/more up-to-date documentation.
Cooper's writing style is concise and clear. Examples are explained well. After having worked through books on AppleScript and Objective-C I wish they had been written by Cooper as well.
5 stars!
Rating: - Best Intro to a programming language I have read
Since this is now my second programming language I am not going through all the growing pains that I did while first learning Perl. That said I learned a lot from my experience and the first thing I learned was that I do not learn well from the O'reilly books. I like them for reference and love their Cookbooks but I did not want to sit through another matter of fact style book with very little personality when I decided to learn Ruby. One of the things that drew me to Ruby in the first place is the atmosphere of fun that surrounds this language. I feel that this book does a very good job of teaching you the language in a way that feels like you are just hanging out and talking with the author. I also like how topics are reviewed in subsequent chapters rather than assuming that since something was explained once it was totally understood. That was a frequent problem I had when learning Perl I felt like if I did not fully understand something I had to basically start the book over. When there is something that you need to fully understand before moving forward the author points it out. I feel like I am really getting the hang or Ruby and I would buy any other offerings from this Author.
Rating: - Very helpful and readable.
One of the other reviews said that it's great because the author, Peter Cooper, makes some basic assumptions (like you know how to use the internet and install programs) but he doesn't assume that you know anything about programming and starts from installing Ruby itself.
I've learned a great deal very quickly, I'd recommend this book to anyone who is wanting to learn Ruby who zero to advanced programming experience.
Rating: - Great book to learn Ruby
A new addition to the "Beginning..." series of books from Apress this one follows the highly successful layout of the other books. It starts with how to install Ruby on various operating systems including Windows, OS X, and Linux. Then the reader gets a good introduction to the basics of Ruby including writing your first few lines of programing. For those who need it the author takes the time to introduces the reader to the concepts of class and object as they related to the object oriented programming environment. From there the reader moves into the basics of programming with Ruby, including variables working with integers, characters and strings interpolation working with an array flow control and regular expressions.
The book then walks the reader through building a text analyzer program. Of course you to know more to create more complex programs and the author delivers a more advanced discussion of classes objects and modules. And no program is complete without documentation, built in error handling and testing. The author goes over these and other items in detail. Finally, in Chapter 12, you develop a much larger Ruby application by writing a bot program. The book ends with a discussion of Ruby on rails.
The book contains several excellent appendices and is filled with code examples. Beginning Ruby is highly recommend to anybody interested in this programming language and provides sufficient information to write basic programs without any difficulty.
Rating:  - Very practical book
This book is for everybody, beginners and proffesional programmers that want to learn ruby. This book has a good structure and a lot of examples.
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