San Francisco, CA, November 7, 2013—Ruby is arguably one of the Web's most powerful programming languages, serving as the backbone of websites like Github, Hulu, and more. But Ruby's inner workings are often mysterious, a fact that continues to frustrate programmers and hackers alike.

Ruby Under a Microscope (No Starch Press, November 2013, 360 pp., $39.95, ISBN 9781593275273) delves deep into Ruby's inner workings—its underlying structure and implementation. Ruby Under a Microscope is full of essential information for developers who want to know as much about their language as possible and for hackers who want to better understand potential vulnerabilities and points of exploitation.

Author Pat Shaughnessy takes a scientific approach, explaining how things work using simple experiments with Ruby code. Readers will learn about alternative implementations of Ruby like JRuby and Rubinius, as well as features like Ruby 2.0's garbage collection algorithm. They will also explore:

• The computer science concepts that underpin Ruby's complex implementation
• How Ruby executes code using a virtual machine
• How classes and modules are the same inside Ruby
• How Ruby employs algorithms originally developed for Lisp
• How Ruby uses grammar rules to parse and understand code
• How Ruby code is translated into a different language by the YARV compiler

"Many people have dug into the Ruby source code, but few make it back out and tell the tale as elegantly as Pat does in Ruby Under a Microscope," says Ruby Inside and Ruby Weekly editor Peter Cooper. "This book is a delight for language implementation geeks and Rubyists with a penchant for digging into the guts of their tools."

Originally released as an ebook, this updated and thoroughly edited version of Ruby Under a Microscope has been extensively reviewed by members of the Ruby community, including Aaron Patterson, a member of both the Ruby and Rails core teams. For anyone who has ever wanted to take a behind-the-scenes look at a programming language, Ruby Under a Microscope provides access to every last bit of Ruby.

The new edition of Ruby Under a Microscope will be available in bookstores everywhere in November 2013.