When Ruby first burst into the scene in the Western world, pragmatic Programmers were there with the definitive reference manual, Programming Ruby: The Pragmatic Programmer's Guide. Now the company Second Edition, author Dave Thomas has developed a pickaxe book famous with more than 200 pages of new content, which includes all the features of new and better language than Ruby 1.8 and standard library modules. If you enjoyed the First Edition, you'll appreciate the new and expanded content, including: increased coverage of installation, packaging, documenting Ruby source code, threading and synchronization, and enhance the ability of Ruby using C-language extensions. Programming for the web in the whole world is easy in Ruby, with new chapters on XML / RPC, SOAP, distributed Ruby, templating system and other web services. This is the definitive reference manual for Ruby, including a description of all standard library modules, complete reference to all built-in classes and modules (including more than 250 significant changes since the First Edition).