Learning Ruby: The Language that Powers Rails

This book is, like many in the “Learning...” series is a very compact introduction to the language. It is primarily, it seems to me, targeting readers who are familiar with at least one other programming language and need only become accustomed to the syntax of this new language. For this audience, which fortunately includes myself, this book is a decent and very compact introduction to all the most common elements of the language.

There are plenty of examples but they seem to get less obvious and assume more of the reader as the book goes on. The most annoying element of the book is that the author seems to delight in teaching you the 5 least common and most difficult ways of doing everything before telling you the easiest and most common way of doing something. This ought to be reversed.