San Francisco, CA, June 30, 2011—Ruby is one of the world's most popular programming languages. It's powerful, expressive, and accessible for even inexperienced coders. But while Ruby is famously easy to learn, most users only scratch the surface of what it can do.

The Book of Ruby (July 2011, 400 pp., $39.95, ISBN 9781593272944) reveals Ruby's hidden inner workings and shows how to write clear, maintainable code. Readers begin with the basics—types, data structures, and control flows—and progress to advanced features like blocks, mixins, metaprogramming, and beyond. Rather than bog things down with a lot of theory, The Book of Ruby takes a hands-on approach and focuses on making coders productive from day one.

"Ruby may be easy to learn, but it's not easy to master," said author Huw Collingbourne. "Many a user has been caught out by its deceptively simple syntax. If you've toyed with Ruby but still feel like you're just playing around, The Book of Ruby will give you the insight you need to make it do remarkable things."

With The Book of Ruby readers learn to:

• Leverage Ruby's succinct and flexible syntax to maximize productivity
• Balance Ruby's functional, imperative, and object-oriented features
• Write self-modifying programs using dynamic programming techniques
• Create new fibers and threads for lightweight multitasking
• 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 readers how Ruby works under the hood, so they won't be caught off guard by its scoping, multithreading features, or precedence rules.

Whether readers are new to programming or just new to Ruby, they'll find The Book of Ruby to be a complete guide to the art of rapid, real-world software development with this unique and elegant language.