Ruby is famous for being easy to learn, but most users only scratch the surface of what it can do. While other books focus on Ruby's trendier features, The Book of Ruby reveals the secret inner workings of one of the world's most popular programming languages, teaching you to write clear, maintainable code. You'll start with the basics-types, data structures, and control flows-and progress to advanced features like blocks, mixins, metaclasses, and beyond. Rather than bog you down with a lot of theory, The Book of Ruby takes a hands-on approach and focuses on making you productive from day one. As you follow along, you'll learn to: * Leverage Ruby's succinct and flexible syntax to maximize your productivity * Balance Ruby's functional, imperative, and object-oriented features * Write self-modifying programs using dynamic programming techniques * Create new fibers and threads to manage independent processes concurrently * Catch and recover from execution errors with robust exception handling * Develop powerful web applications with the Ruby on Rails framework Each chapter includes a "Digging Deeper" section that shows you how Ruby works under the hood, so you'll never be caught off guard by its deceptively simple scoping, multithreading features, or precedence rules. Whether you're new to programming or just new Ruby, The Book of Ruby is your guide to rapid, real-world software development with this unique and elegant language.