welcome
Dear Reader:
Thank you for purchasing the MEAP to The Well-Grounded Rubyist, 4th Edition. We are delighted to bring you this edition, which covers Ruby version 3.4. Your two authors, David and Joe, collaborated on the previous (third) edition, and have known each other and worked side-by-side on Ruby projects and initiatives for many years.
The Well-Grounded Rubyist, originally authored by David, was first published in 2009. The book has served as a guide for thousands of Rubyists over the years. David took us from Ruby 1.8, when the language and the community were young, through Ruby 2.1, by which time the language was thoroughly mainstream. The third, co-authored edition covered Ruby 2.7, and was published in 2019. With Ruby 3 now the standard, the time is right for a new edition of the book.
Today, Ruby is one of the most popular languages in the world. It is a flexible, expressive language with a wide array of uses. The Ruby community is celebrated as a welcoming place where new programmers are brought along and experienced engineers churn out countless open source libraries and tools for the benefit of other Rubyists.