The Ruby Programming Language is the authoritative guide to Ruby and provides comprehensive coverage of versions 1.8 and 1.9 of the language. It was written (and illustrated ) by an all-star team: David Flanagan, bestselling author of programming language "bibles" (including JavaScript: The Definitive Guide and Java in a Nutshell ) and committer to the Ruby Subversion repository. Yukihiro "Matz" Matsumoto, creator, designer and lead developer of Ruby and author of Ruby in a Nutshell , which has been expanded and revised to become this book. why the lucky stiff, artist and Ruby programmer extraordinaire. This book begins with a quick-start tutorial to the language, and then explains the language in detail from the bottom up: from lexical and syntactic structure to datatypes to expressions and statements and on through methods, blocks, lambdas, closures, classes and modules.The book also includes a long and thorough introduction to the rich API of the Ruby platform, demonstrating -- with heavily-commented example code -- Ruby's facilities for text processing, numeric manipulation, collections, input/output, networking, and concurrency. An entire chapter is devoted to Ruby's metaprogramming capabilities. The Ruby Programming Language documents the Ruby language definitively but without the formality of a language specification. It is written for experienced programmers who are new to Ruby, and for current Ruby programmers who want to challenge their understanding and increase th