Rating:  - Easy to follow this book
I found that the book is easy to follow and gets you started without any prior Ruby experience. It covers installation and has examples that really work to get you going. The book is a good foundation to know enough about Ruby and points you where to go next.
Rating:  - Great for Novices, Eye Catching for Professionals
This book is a reasonable introduction to Ruby for novice to intermediate programmers. I do not recommend it highly for professional programmers with extensive experience. For advanced programmers unfamiliar with Ruby hoping to implement a large project with a short learning period, the book, while quite broad in its coverage, is far too shallow in its handling of any specific topic. Given the name "Beginning Ruby", this is reasonable. However, given the subtitle "From Novice to Professional", my assessment is that it learns too far to the novice side of that range.
An excellent professor that I had the pleasure to study under once hypothesized that a programming book's value is usually inversely proportional to its length. This book tends to support that hypothesis. Its descriptions are overly wordy at the expense of completeness.
If you are a novice programmer, buy this book. If you are a professional, have your employer buy this book for you, get it for free, and place it on your bookshelf just to let everyone know you're a Ruby programmer.
Rating: - Great Book for new programmers
I have zero programming experience (unless you count html) and I have attempted to get into programming before, but most books frustrated me. This book is very thorough and it gives you clear explanations for everything. It could be that Ruby is easier to learn than other languages (that's what I've been told), but if you are truly a novice you will be able to get through this book pretty easily and you will have a good foundation of the language.
Rating: - The Best Book to Get If You Want to Get Up To Speed Quickly With Ruby
I have been a professional programmer for nearly twenty years and I have learned and used many programming languages along the way. My normal process for learning a new language is to do a lot of online research regarding the books that are available and buy several of the books that are consistently praised my most folks.
Ruby posed some difficulties in this area because, until recently, there have not been very many Ruby books available in English. I purchased several books, and while I will not say that any of them were bad, I will say that until I got my hands on "Beginning Ruby", I was not making very good progress in learning the language.
All of the other Ruby books that I have tried to use for learning followed that same very tired pattern. The first several chapters of the book cover various aspects of the language in-depth. There would be a chapter about variables, a chapter about flow control, a chapter about classes and objects, etc. Each chapter covers the subject in detail. That's fine for a language reference, but not a very effecting way to teach someone a new programming language.
Mr. Cooper's approach is one that I would like to see other authors of programming tutorials adopt. After the obligatory chapters on getting Ruby installed on your system, and giving a "whistle-stop" overview of the language, he begins to cover surprising number of topics in the third chapter. Rather than cover each facet of the language in-depth, he covers many, many facets of the language, even some more advanced concepts like symbols and blocks, but only superficially. The result is that by the time you hit chapter four, you are ready to start writing a "real" application that uses many of the features you were just introduced to.
The book has a nice, conversational style. When a topic is introduced, the author reassures the reader that it will be covered in more depth later in the book. There are also several points where the author stops the reader and says something like "don't read on until this makes sense."
This book belongs in the hands of anyone and everyone who is serious about learning the Ruby programming language.
Rating: - Excellent Book
This is an excellent. I started out reading another book, "Programming Ruby" also known as the Pickaxe Book. Although the Pickaxe book is an excellent reference guide, it covers too much for a beginner programmer to comprehend.
The Pickaxe book regularly uses examples of code that have not been defined, confusing the reader. Not so with "Beginning Ruby". The Author, Peter Cooper, writes in a very condensed and chronological manner. Simple concepts are explained and then built upon. It's as if Peter Cooper cuts the steak up into small pieces so it all goes down. With the Pickaxe book, the author is trying to swallow the steak down in one huge gulp.
I would highly recommend this book for anyone that wants to learn Ruby. I would also recommend purchasing the Pickaxe book to be used as a reference guide to all the features available in Ruby.
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