Book Note: Teach Yourself Ruby in 21 Days

I started learning the Ruby programming language today. Ruby and the associated framework product, Ruby on Rails, seem to be all the rage among web 2.0 developers, so I thought I'd give it a try. It seems to be a "real" object oriented language, so I'm looking forward to it. I've programmed in Perl, which can be forced to use OO techniques, and Python, which is much more OOish, but I've mostly used them in a procedural manner. This time I'm going to try and really work with classes as well as objects. Back in the early 90s, when OOP first appeared in popular use, Borland hired me to write a book about their future dBASE for Windows product. I spent a year doing nothing but studying OO ideas and really fell in love with the approach. Sadly, the product was a bust, and the book never saw the light of day.

I have a stack of Ruby books on my desk, and I'm going to start with this one from Sams. You can find the details at Amazon if you want to read along with me.