Learning Ruby

In the past months I’ve made a habit of attending as many of the Meetups related to web development around Dayton as I can and I’ve noted a growing number of local firms that specialize in Ruby.  That being said, I’ve only taken the time to skim through a handful of tutorials and stumble through writing a few programs for Project Euler challenges.  So I’ve purchased a number of textbooks to get better acquainted with both Ruby and Rails.

• The Ruby Programming Language by David Flanagan and Yukihiro Matsumoto
• Programming Ruby 1.9 by Dave Thomas
• Ruby Best Practices by Gregory T. Brown
• Ruby Cookbook by Lucas Carlson and Leonard Richardson
• Ruby on Rails Tutorial Second Edition by Michael Hartl

Skimming over the structure of each text I’m concerned that they serve more as quick primers and references than structured learning tools like the Java and C++ text that I’ve previously studied.  (The main difference being the lack of programming exercises at the end of each chapter offering actual direction for practice.)  That being said I plan to read them one by one and take the time to experiment with the concepts presented in each chapter so that I’ll have my own code to reference.