Eloquent Ruby (US | UK) by Russ Olsen is a book about the Ruby programming language that focuses on Ruby programming style by teaching you how to write your code as a real Rubyist.

This is the second Olsen’s book about Ruby. In 2007 he published Design Patterns in Ruby, an other great example of how common programming practices like Design Patterns apply to the Ruby world.

Eloquent Ruby is a very lightweight and pleasant reading. The colloquial tone is friendly and engrossing. The books has plenty of code snippets and it requires only a few days to read it from start to end.

Be prepared, this is an unconventional Ruby book. To use author’s words

This is a book about making that final leap, about absorbing the Ruby programming culture, about becoming truly fluent in Ruby.

This is something I have been claiming for the last 5 years. Learning Ruby is not difficult, start thinking in Ruby and becoming a Rubyist is the real challenge.

A formal understanding of the mechanics of Ruby isn’t the same as really looking at the programming world through Ruby-colored glasses. You need to absorb the cultural part of Ruby, to see how real Rubyist use the language to solve problems.

This is one of the reasons that convinced me to create the Rubyist.

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