Dedication

For Barbara Aronstein Black, and in memory of Charles L. Black, Jr. (1915-2001), with love.

Thanks for the writing genes.

Brief Table of Contents

Copyright

Brief Table of Contents

Table of Contents

Preface

Acknowledgments

About this Book

About the Cover Illustration

1. Ruby foundations

Chapter 1. Bootstrapping your Ruby literacy

Chapter 2. Objects, methods, and local variables

Chapter 3. Organizing objects with classes

Chapter 4. Modules and program organization

Chapter 5. The default object (self), scope, and visibility

Chapter 6. Control-flow techniques

2. Built-in classes and modules

Chapter 7. Built-in essentials

Chapter 8. Strings, symbols, and other scalar objects

Chapter 9. Collection and container objects

Chapter 10. Collections central: Enumerable and Enumerator

Chapter 11. Regular expressions and regexp-based string operations

Chapter 12. File, I/O, and system operations

3. Ruby dynamics

Chapter 13. Object individuation

Chapter 14. Callable and runnable objects

Chapter 15. Callbacks, hooks, and runtime introspection

Index

List of Figures

List of Tables

List of Listings

Table of Contents

Copyright

Brief Table of Contents

Table of Contents

Preface

Acknowledgments

About this Book

About the Cover Illustration

1. Ruby foundations

Chapter 1. Bootstrapping your Ruby literacy

1.1. Basic Ruby language literacy

1.1.1. Meet Interactive Ruby (irb), your new best friend

1.1.2. A Ruby syntax survival kit

1.1.3. The variety of Ruby identifiers