The Ruby Programming Language

 Content: Introduction --
 A Tour of Ruby --
 Try Ruby --
 About This Book --
 A Sudoku Solver in Ruby --
 The Structure and Execution of Ruby Programs --
 Lexical Structure --
 Syntactic Structure --
 File Structure --
 Program Encoding --
 Program Execution --
 Datatypes and Objects --
 Numbers --
 Text --
 Arrays --
 Hashes --
 Ranges --
 Symbols --
 True, False, and Nil --
 Objects --
 Expressions and Operators --
 Literals and Keyword Literals --
 Variable References --
 Constant References --
 Method Invocations --
 Assignments --
 Operators --
 Statements and Control Structures --
 Conditionals --
 Loops --
 Iterators and Enumerable Objects --
 Blocks --
 Altering Control Flow --
 Exceptions and Exception Handling --
 BEGIN and END --
 Threads, Fibers, and Continuations --
 Methods, Procs, Lambdas, and Closures --
 Defining Simple Methods --
 Method Names --
 Methods and Parentheses --
 Method Arguments --
 Procs and Lambdas --
 Closures --
 Method Objects --
 Functional Programming --
 Classes and Modules --
 Defining a Simple Class --
 Method Visibility: Public, Protected, Private --
 Subclassing and Inheritance --
 Object Creation and Initialization --
 Modules --
 Loading and Requiring Modules --
 Singleton Methods and the Eigenclass --
 Method Lookup --
 Constant Lookup --
 Reflection and Metaprogramming --
 Types, Classes, and Modules --
 Evaluating Strings and Blocks --
 Variables and Constants --
 Methods --
 Hooks --
 Tracing --
 ObjectSpace and GC --
 Custom Control Structures --
 Missing Methods and Missing Constants --
 Dynamically Creating Methods --
 Alias Chaining --
 Domain-Specific Languages --
 The Ruby Platform --
 Strings --
 Regular Expressions --
 Numbers and Math --
 Dates and Times --
 Collections --
 Files and Directories --
 Input/Output --
 Networking --
 Threads and Concurrency --
 The Ruby Environment --
 Invoking the Ruby Interpreter --
 The Top-Level Environment --
 Practical Extraction and Reporting Shortcuts --
 Calling the OS --
 Security.
 Abstract:             
              A guide to Ruby that provides coverage of versions 1.8 and 1.9 of the language. It explains the language from the bottom up: from lexical and syntactic structure to datatypes to expressions and statements and on through methods, blocks, lambdas, closures, classes and modules.                 �Read more...