The Mandelbear's Musings

Recently I've been looking into the programming language Ruby. This page has a lot of good resources, including some for people who know nothing at all about programming and want a quick introduction. Ruby turns out to be a particularly good first language, in part because of its closeness to Smalltalk, which was originally designed as a teaching language.

Learn to Program, by Chris Pine is a good introduction to programming, in 12 easy web pages. Reading this and following the examples won't make you a programmer, but it will get you pointed in the right direction.

Why's (Poingnant) Guide to Ruby by why the lucky stiff is a quirky, funny, occasionally (yes) poingnant guide to the language with cartoon foxes and weird sidebars; significantly more complete than Learn to Program. Experienced programmers will probably find it too slow and rambling, but it's an entertaining ramble if you have the time for it.

Programming Ruby (The Pragmatic Programmer's Guide) by Dave Thomas is a more traditional introduction, perhaps not as elegant as the Report on the Algorithmic Language Algol 60, but highly accessible. You could easily use it as an introductory programming textbook.

If you're already familiar with some other programming language, you should head directly to Ruby From Other Languages -- although it doesn't mention Smalltalk, which is arguably the closest match.

If you're a web developer and haven't been living under a rock for the last four years you already know about Ruby on Rails.