why's (poignant) Guide to Ruby

why's (poignant) Guide to Ruby, sometimes called w(p)GtR or just "the poignant guide", is an introductory book to the Ruby programming language, written by why the lucky stiff. The book is distributed under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike license.

The book is unusual among programming books in that it includes quite a lot of strange humour and narrative side tracks which are sometimes completely unrelated to the topic. Many motifs have become inside jokes in the Ruby community, such as references to the words "chunky bacon". The book includes many characters which have become popular as well, particularly the cartoon foxes and Trady Blix, a large black feline friend of _why's, who acts as a guide to the foxes (and occasionally teaches them some Ruby).

The book is published in HTML and PDF. Chapter three was reprinted in The Best Software Writing I: Selected and Introduced by Joel Spolsky (Apress, 2005).

Why's (poignant) Guide to Ruby was singled out by Mathew Huntbach in his disparaging article [1] about Ruby as a "particularly horrid example" of the "many cutesy tutorials" of Ruby language he encountered.

Chapters

The book itself is incomplete and new chapters appear from time to time.

1. About this book
2. Kon'nichi wa, Ruby
3. A Quick (and Hopefully Painless) Ride Through Ruby (with Cartoon Foxes) – basic introduction to central Ruby concepts
4. Floating Little Leaves of Code – evaluation and values, hashes and lists
5. Them What Make the Rules and Them What Live the Dream – case/when, while/until, variable scope, blocks, methods, class definitions, class attributes, objects, modules, introspection in IRB, dup, self, rbconfig module
6. Downtown – metaprogramming, regular expressions
7. When You Wish Upon a Beard – send method, new methods in existing classes
8. Heaven’s Harp

The following chapters are "Expansion Paks":

1. The Tiger’s Vest (with a Basic Introduction to IRB) – discusses IRB, the interactive Ruby interpreter.

External links

The guide was at www.poignantguide.net/ruby/ but it was taken offline on August 19, 2009 along with much of the author's online presence. By June 2011, the domain is parked. However, there are mirrors:

• why's (poignant) Guide to Ruby Mirror of the guide on Scribd.
• why's (poignant) Guide to Ruby Mirror of the guide, PDF version.
• why's (poignant) Guide to Ruby Mirror of the guide, alternative PDF version (book format).
• why's (poignant) Guide to Ruby Mirror of the guide, html version.
• why's (poignant) Guide to Ruby Mirror of the guide, ePub version.
• why's (poignant) Guide to Ruby Mirror of the guide, mobi (Kindle) version.