The Ruby Bookshelf

This is the place to find and freely read many Pandora electronic books and online articles about Ruby, the majority of which are licensed under the Creative Commons License or the GNU Free Documentation License, while the rest have been made available through the generosity of the content authors who have given explicit permissions to The Ruby Bookshelf to reproduce and publish their articles.

If you are curious about Ruby, this is a good place to start to read and learn more about this really cool programming language. You will even be able to start practicing your newly gained Ruby programming skills right here, without leaving The Ruby Bookshelf, thanks to the Pandora’s Box programming framework that makes selected bookshelf pages programmable.

Contents in individual Pandora books

The books marked with a bullet (•) are still under construction.

  An Invitation to Ruby by Jim Weirich

Ruby is an object-oriented scripting language with a great deal of flexibility and power. This presentation is not a tutorial on Ruby (although we will see a lot of Ruby code), but a simple invitation to come check it out. Hopefully, you will be enticed.

  Ruby User’s Guide by Yukihiro ‘Matz’ Matsumoto, the language creator

Ruby is “an easy object oriented language”. It may seem a little strange at first, but it is designed to be easily read and written. This User’s Guide will get you started at invoking and using ruby, and give you insights into ruby’s nature that you may not get from the reference manual.

• Learning Ruby by Daniel Carrera

This is a short and straightforward tutorial that covers the basics of Ruby programming.

  Ruby Newsgroup FAQ by Conrad Schneiker and Hal Fulton

This is the list of frequently asked questions and their answers for the comp.lang.ruby newsgroup.

  Coming to Ruby from Java by Francis Hwang

A number of tips—some simple, some advanced—for the serious Java programmer who’s starting to become a serious Ruby programmer.

  Things That Newcomers to Ruby Should Know by William Djaja Tjokroaminata

A welcome guide for the Ruby newcomer, highlighting some common facts that may be a bit surprising, as well as other good things.

Links to essential Ruby resources

• The official Ruby language site
  http://www.ruby-lang.org/

• Ruby language frequently asked questions and answers
  http://www.rubygarden.org/iowa/faqtotum

• Ruby language core library API documentation
  http://www.ruby-doc.org/core/

• Ruby language standard library API documentation
  http://www.ruby-doc.org/stdlib/

• Collection of core and standard library extensions
  http://facets.rubyforge.org/

• Help and documentation for Ruby
  http://www.ruby-doc.org/

• Open source Ruby projects
  http://www.rubyforge.org/

• Public directory of Ruby applications
  http://raa.ruby-lang.org/