Learning Ruby

Ruby is a single-inheritance object-oriented interpreted language invented by Matsumoto Yukihiro first released in 1995. Ruby on Rails is David Hansson's "full-stack framework for developing database-backed Web applications according to the Model-View-Controller pattern" released in 2004.

The following 2 books might prove useful in learning Ruby; Michael Fitzgerald's "Learning Ruby" (O'Reilly, 2007), is an outstanding initial introduction to Ruby, Rails and object-oriented programming as well. It's very well organized and gives you more than enough information to get started.

The second book, "Ruby by Example: Concepts and Code" (No Starch Press, 2007) by Kevin C. Baird delves deeper into the Ruby language and how to use it. It offers numerous examples of code that not only shows one how to get non-trivial things done with Ruby, but provides practically (re-) usable code samples as well. It rounds out the more basic introduction to Ruby in Fitzgerald's book.

You actually don't need a book to get started with Ruby. Check out "Programming Ruby" at http://www.rubycentral.com/book/.

You can download Ruby itself at http://www.ruby-lang.org/ and the Rails framework at http://www.rubyonrails.org/.

Excellent and extensive documentation for Rails can be found at http://api.rubyonrails.org/.

Microsoft has announced a .NET implementation named IronRuby, look @ http://news.com.com/8301-10784_3-9748973-7.html