Looking to learn Ruby programming language? You’re lucky: The Book of Ruby, fresh from the oven 3rd Edition has been published by No Starch Press. Written by Huw Collingbourne, the developer of Ruby in Steel IDE, so it’s quite a special treat.

The book contains 425 pages in 20 chapters, while quite short it explains well a lot of the Ruby programming language constructs that you will use everyday.

Ruby development learning materials covered are as follows:

• Chapters 1 to 3 cover strings, numbers, etc as well as the basic Ruby class hierarchy.
• Chapter 4 tackles arrays and hashes.
• Chapters 5 and 6 cover loops and conditionals.
• Chapters 7 to 10 teach methods, arguments, exceptions and blocks.
• Chapter 11 covers symbols, a small but important piece of the puzzle.
• Chapter 12 describes Ruby modules and mixins.
• Chapter 13 is about files and I/O.
• Chapters 14 to 20 are a mishmash of various smaller topics such as YAML, a short chapter on Rails, etc.

Some chapters are structured like tutorials and are truly a joy to read. Instructions on the book are easy follow even for beginners. The author usually goes straight to the point, explaining the principles, usage description, with several practical examples.

Only a single chapter in this book, chapter 19, is devoted to Ruby on Rails web applications development. Though it is very short, it serves well as quick way to get you started with Web 2.0 applications programming. This also proves Ruby on Rails’ powerfulness: you don’t need to do much to get the common functionality working rightaway! Ruby on Rails lets you focus on the tasks that matter, saving you from the boring boilerplate work.

Even if you already start developing with Ruby on Rails, this book will help you unleash the potential of your Ruby on Rails apps with Ruby language features you may not know before. You can get The Book of Ruby here.

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