A new addition to the "Beginning..." series of books from Apress this one follows the highly successful layout of the other books. It starts with how to install Ruby on various operating systems including Windows, OS X, and Linux. Then the reader gets a good introduction to the basics of Ruby including writing your first few lines of programing. For those who need it the author takes the time to introduces the reader to the concepts of class and object as they related to the object oriented programming environment. From there the reader moves into the basics of programming with Ruby, including variables working with integers, characters and strings interpolation working with an array flow control and regular expressions. The book then walks the reader through building a text analyzer program. Of course you to know more to create more complex programs and the author delivers a more advanced discussion of classes objects and modules. And no program is complete without documentation, built in error handling and testing. The author goes over these and other items in detail. Finally, in Chapter 12, you develop a much larger Ruby application by writing a bot program. The book ends with a discussion of Ruby on rails. The book contains several excellent appendices and is filled with code examples. Beginning Ruby is highly recommend to anybody interested in this programming language and provides sufficient information to write basic programs without any difficulty.