Preface

In 2006, Manning published my book Ruby for Rails: Ruby Techniques for Rails Developers. My goal in writing Ruby for Rails—or, as it has come to be known, R4R—was to provide Rails developers with both an understanding of the fact that being a Rails developer means being a Ruby developer, and a solid grasp of Ruby. I chose Ruby topics for inclusion (and exclusion) based on my judgment as to their relative importance for people who wanted to learn Ruby mainly in order to use Rails correctly and effectively.

Critical response to R4R was very good. The book filled a void: it was neither just a Ruby book nor just a Rails book, but a Ruby book “optimized,” so to speak, for the Rails developer. I was pleased by the book’s reception—and particularly by the many people who, after reading it, asked me whether I had any plans to write a whole book just about Ruby, and encouraged me to write one.

And that, to make a long story short, is what I have done.

The Well-Grounded Rubyist is a “just Ruby” book, and it’s written to be read by anyone interested in Ruby. It’s a descendant of R4R but not exactly an update. It’s more of a repurposing. There’s some overlap with R4R, but there’s also a lot of new material (more than I originally anticipated, in fact); and everything, overlap or not, has been oiled and polished and spiffed up to work with Ruby 1.9.1, the newest version of Ruby (and very new) at the time the book went to press.