Written by Yukihiro Matsumoto (“Matz”), creator of the language, Ruby in a Nutshell is a practical reference guide covering everything from Ruby syntax to the specifications of its standard class libraries. The book is based on Ruby 1.6, and is applicable to development versions 1.7 and the next planned stable version 1.8. 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.

If you’re interested in JRuby, you probably don’t need a turorial on Ruby, Rails, or Java – you just need to know how to get things done. This Cookbook offers practical solutions for using the Java implementation of the Ruby language, with targeted recipes for deploying Rails web applications on Java servers, integrating JRuby code with Java technologies, developing JRuby desktop applications with Java toolkits, and more.

Bestselling author David Flanagan teams up with Ruby creator Yukihiro “Matz” Matsumoto and writer/cartoonist/programmer why the lucky stiff to bring you the authoritative guide to Ruby. Covering versions 1.9 and 1.8, this book helps you learn Ruby’s lexical structure, primary expressions, conditionals, syntax, classes, the data it manipulates, and more. For experienced programmers who want to look at this language in depth, this guide is invaluable.

Are you a tester who spends more time manually creating complex test data than using it? A business analyst who seemingly went to college all those years so you can spend your days copying data from reports into spreadsheets? A programmer who can’t finish each day’s task without having to scan through version control system output, looking for the file you want?

You don’t have to know everything about a car to drive one, and you don’t need to know everything about Ruby to start programming with it. Written for both experienced and new programmers alike, Learning Ruby is a just-get-in-and-drive book – a hands-on tutorial that offers lots of Ruby programs and lets you know how and why they work, just enough to get you rolling down the road.

Although Ruby is an easy language to learn, in the heat of action you may find that you can’t remember the correct syntax for a conditional or the name of a method. This handy pocket reference offers brief yet clear explanations of Ruby’s core components, from operators to reserved words to data structures to method syntax, highlighting those key features that you’ll likely use every day when coding Ruby.