Programming Ruby 2nd Edition
I do most of my small scripts and minor hacks in Perl, it’s powerful, cross-platform and it has CPAN. While I’ve spent some time investigating other languages such as Python, Groovy and even sed and awk for certain tasks, only one has held my interest; Ruby.
It was recently announced that the second edition of the Pragmatic Programmers Programming Ruby (the pickaxe book) is now available for preorder in PDF and dead tree formats. I’ve put my order in and if you’re interested in getting things done quickly in a language that makes it extremely easy to write maintainable code I’d suggest you do the same. Don’t just take my word for it, the first edition is freely available online, have a look for yourself. You can find the HTML version of the first edition of Programming Ruby at the other end of that link.