What's on your mind?

[Kain Nobel]

There is Ruby-Doc and the Ruby Forum, but you might want to pick up a book first. There's nothing wrong with learning online, it's all about your personal preference, but I learned from paper media. Here are some books you might find useful.

• Ruby Programming Language
  
• Programming Ruby 1.9 & 2.0
  
• Why's (Poignant) Guide to Ruby
  
• Ruby Cookbook
  
• Best of Ruby Quiz
  

These are the books I've learned from and they've each got their own merits. The first three, more or less, break down the basics of the language and how each particular concept works; I would get any one of them, you definitely don't need all three, but it wouldn't hurt if you can check them out each for free at a public library. Yukihiro Matsumoto, the creator of Ruby, co-wrote the first one so you already know he knows best. On the other hand, I really enjoy Why's breakdown of how Ruby works, he's a bit more clear and descriptive in his example syntax. Either way, it's a win-win situation.

The Ruby Cookbook is great but you may want to wait on that one until you're comfortable with programming as it's a little more advanced. Then again, honestly, it's never too early or too late to pick up the Ruby Cookbook as it contains so many abstract concepts beyond being just a vanilla how-it-works book. Seriously good stuff, there is a lot of interesting things to learn from it. If you have the money, I'd definitely purchase a copy and never let go of it.

Best of Ruby Quiz has some similarities to the Ruby Cookbook, a list of challenging and advanced concepts with source code. You can visit the author's website here but you might want your own copy if it ever goes down. Again, definitely worth checking out, might be another "worth your dollar, don't let go of it" books.

There is way more literature on Ruby nowadays VS when I was booking, but most of them I haven't read or I would make some recommendations. You might want to double check to make sure you find the latest edition, some of these have been re-released 3 or 4 times by now.