Quick and effective introduction to Ruby

The authors have a wonderful style for introducting the lanaguage Ruby, assuming that you have at least a small amount of prior programming experience. The order of presentation and the amount of polish throughout made this a joy to read and introduces Ruby at a very rapid, yet comfortable, pace.

It does seem to suffer from wanting to be both an introduction to Ruby and a reference manual as well; the last several chapters look (and read like) reference materials. While I'm not opposed to that, the book doesn't have the kind of binding that lets it easily lay flat on your desk open to the page, so I'm more inclined to just open the docs on a separate monitor instead. The book might as well have been lighter and just had a pointer to docs online.

Also, I wonder if some of the presentations of concepts like closures and contiuations aren't a bit too rapid for the casual reader. If you've had a programming background in Scheme or Lisp, it's old hat; however, as I was reading through their presentations and the relatively quick examples, it felt likely that many readers wouldn't get a lot of the subtelty in what was going on under the hood to make the language features work or in what kinds of real world scenarios those sorts of features are useful.

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• Quick and effective introduction to Ruby
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