Ruby Programming Essentials

"Creating a Self Contained Ruby Executable on Linux or UNIX" Aside from the simplistic style, misleading or erroneous statements like the title quoted here are another reason for disliking this book. Adding a "shebang" at the beginning of a file doesn't create a self-contained program. If ruby is not installed on the system, the shebang does nothing; therefore, it's not self-contained.

I initially bought this book as a gift for a developer who was stuck in the PHP world. After I gave it a quick look over, I was very satisfied with how well it was written. This book was a great little refresher and I could see it being beneficial to newer Ruby coders as well.

Some of the examples I feel coulf use a deeper explanation if the book really is geared towards beginners that hope to start out with Ruby. On the whole though as a PHP developer I found it a quick and understandable read.