Ruby in a Nutshell

Über

Ruby is an absolutely pure object-oriented scripting language written
in C and designed with Perl and Python capabilities in mind. While its
roots are in Japan, Ruby is slowly but surely gaining ground in the US.
The goal of Yukihiro Matsumoto, creator of Ruby and author of this
book, is to incorporate the strengths of languages like Perl, Python,
Lisp and Smalltalk. Ruby is a genuine attempt to combine the best of
everything in the scripting world. Since 1993, Ruby mailing lists have
been established, Web pages have formed, and a community has grown
around it. The language itself is very good at text processing and is
notable for its broad object orientation. Ruby is portable and runs
under GNU/Linux (and other Unices) as well as DOS, MS Windows and Mac.
With Ruby in a Nutshell, Matsumoto offers a practical
reference to the features of this new language including the
command-line options, syntax, built-in variables, functions, and many
commonly used classes and modules. This guide covers the current stable
version of Ruby (1.6), yet is applicable to the development version 1.7
and the next planned stable version 1.8. You will find a thorough
description of Ruby's language syntax, and a description of the core
functionality built into the standard Ruby interpreter, which has more
than 800 built-in methods in 42 classes and modules. Ruby finds its
power through its built-in libraries, and this handy volume take you
through the many useful libraries that come with the standard Ruby
distribution--from network access via HTTP and CGI programming, to data
persistence using the DBM library. This book concludes with coverage of
the unique tools that come with Ruby, including the debugger, profiler,
and irb (or interactive ruby.)
Find out how Ruby combines the strengths of other languages, and why it
has captured the interest of so many open source programmers. As part
of the successful "in a nutshell" series of books from O'Reilly
Associates, Ruby in a Nutshell is for readers who want a single desktop
reference for all their needs.