I finally finished reading my first book on Ruby programming. Ruby: Visual QuickStart Guide, by Larry Ullman has to be the perfect introduction book for anyone trying to learn the Ruby programming language, even though sadly it only has 3 five star reviews on Amazon. The author writing thoroughly explains the concepts in a friendly and easy to understand manner. This being the third book that I’ve read from this same author, the other titles being for MySQL and PHP (no reviews on these yet since I’m not fully finished reading them).

One thing I would’ve like changed the author to change was on the database chapter, as it was mainly focused on SQLite. It would have been better if the author used MySQL instead. Also it would have been better if the author removed the dedicated chapter to Rails, and instead extended the chapter to have more generic web related like Net::HTTP, given how powerful that single class is.

Chapter 1: Getting Started
Chapter 2: Simple Scripts
Chapter 3: Simple Types
Chapter 4: Array, Ranges, and Hashes
Chapter 5: Control structures
Chapter 6: Creating Methods
Chapter 7: Creating Classes
Chapter 8: Inheritance and More
Chapter 9: Modules and Includes
Chapter 10: Regular Expressions
Chapter 11: Debugging and Error Handling
Chapter 12: Rubygems
Chapter 13: Directories and Files
Chapter 14: Databases
Chapter 15: Networking
Chapter 16: Ruby on Rails
Chapter 17: Dynamic Programing

I would highly recommended this book to anybody starting or wanting to learn Ruby.
Ruby-Visual-QuickStart
4/5