Ruby in Practice

The book read like a traditional Cookbook style reference. The problem I found with the book is that it lacks enough recipes to separate it from the Dave Thomas Programming Ruby and Agile Development with Rails, both introductory programming books. In addition, I find that screencast and websites do a better job at teaching several of the tutorials that are found in this manual. If you are newer to Ruby and want to find some good uses of the language than this book can point you in that direction.