I wish I had found this book when it was first published!

Brian Marick explains Ruby and programming fundamentals in a way anyone can understand. His writing is engaging and, in places, humorous. That made this book an easy, fun read. And when I sat down at my computer, book in hand, I understood what I was doing and why.

But the key reason I enjoyed this book and learned from it is this…

Brian Marick anticipates the questions a Ruby learner would ask and answers them without delay.

When he introduced the collect message in three lines by stringing together the opening of a file with reading the lines of the file, iterating through those lines and changing all strings to lowercase – while shoving the result into a new array, I understood how this was accomplished. But the question in my mind was, “Why didn’t we break this up into several statements?”

Then I turned the page and read, “You might think that using some intermediate names might make it easier to understand the code…”

I breathed a sigh of relief because I’m the type of person who gets hung up easily, frustrated and stopped in her tracks when she doesn’t understand something. All subsequent learning stops and blood pressure rises until I get or find an explanation. And there it was. “Hail Mary, Mother of God…” Brian Marick wrote this book for me.

If you want to “learn the basics of the Ruby scripting language” start with this book. If you follow along with him and do the exercises, you’ll build your confidence and your abilities. Then you can move on to the four inch thick Ruby books without fear.

Happy Learning!