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The Well-Grounded Rubyist

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The Well-Grounded Rubyist, by David A. Black, is a thorough "Ruby only" reworking and expansion of the acclaimed 2006 book Ruby for Rails, which has given countless Rails practitioners a deep understanding of Ruby.

"TWGR" covers Ruby 1.9.1, and includes coverage of topics not covered in "R4R"; and where the two books share topics, everything has been completely updated and revised for "TWGR". Although it's not "for Rails" specifically, The Well-Grounded Rubyist will serve the needs of the "Rails generation" of Ruby programmers, whether they are specializing in Rails or using Ruby for other purposes.

Keep reading for reader comments and the book's table of contents!

Praise for The Well-Grounded Rubyist

If you are looking to understand ruby, look no further.

The Well-Grounded Rubyist is absolutely the best book to become familiar with ruby at present.... There is no replacement for the author being a first-rate educator.

...an absorbing readable book that would sit proudly on any Ruby programmer’s bookshelf.

David does an excellent job going beyond the language and hitting those concepts in the built-in classes and modules that you need to know and will experience in the real-world.

...a great way to learn just how Ruby crams so much expressiveness into such a simple clean framework.

Each topic takes a zero-to-hero approach meaning that you can bring little regular expression knowledge to the table yet still walk away learning an immense amount about the subject.

Table of contents

PART 1: RUBY FOUNDATIONS

  • Chapter 1: How Ruby Works
  • Chapter 2: Objects and variables
  • Chapter 3: Organizing objects with classes
  • Chapter 4: Modules and program organization
  • Chapter 5: The default object (self) and scope
  • Chapter 6: Controlling program flow

PART 2: BUILT-IN CLASSES AND MODULES

  • Chapter 7: Built-in essentials
  • Chapter 8: Strings, symbols, numbers, and other scalar objects
  • Chapter 9: Collections and containers
  • Chapter 10: Enumerables and enumerators
  • Chapter 11: Regular expressions and regex-based string operations
  • Chapter 12: File and IO operations

PART 3: RUBY DYNAMICS

  • Chapter 13: Objects and their individuality
  • Chapter 14: Callable and runnable objects
  • Chapter 15: Reflection and callbacks