5 Best Ruby Books for Beginners & Advanced Programmers

Ruby programming language is a dynamic and open-source programming language and was developed by a Japanese computer scientist Yukihiro Matsumoto as an “Object-Oriented Scripting language” and was released in the year 1995. In this post, we have listed some of the best Ruby books for Beginners & advanced programmers to learn Ruby language.

Before going into the list, let us give you some more information about the Ruby programming language.

Ruby is ranked among the top 10 programming languages in terms of growth and popularity among programmers.

Ruby is completely free and you don’t have to pay anyone. Further, you can use, copy, modify and distribute it freely.

Ruby is pretty easy to learn due to its clean and easy syntax. It has features such as dynamic type and automatic memory management.

Similar to Java or Python, Ruby has inbuilt exception handling features that make it easy to handle errors.

Ruby can be used for web applications, web servers, system utilities, backups, and parsing, etc. The most popular example of the Ruby project is Rails (web framework for Ruby).

Ruby has a friendly development community, big libraries and tools such as Rails framework have made it the language of choice for big companies such as GitHub, Shopify, and SlideShare.

So it was a small introduction to Ruby language. It’s time now to go over the best books on Ruby.

Best Ruby Books for Beginners & Advanced Programmers

1. Head First Ruby: A Brain-Friendly Guide

*Head First Ruby: A Brain-Friendly Guide by Jay McGavren*

Head First Ruby is a simple and easy-to-follow book to learn the Ruby programming language.

In this book, you will get plenty of practical examples with lots of code snippets to get mastery over Ruby.

You will also learn how to work with third-party libraries and how to build an application on Sinatra (a free and open-source software web application library).

This book will explain to you how Ruby works behind the scenes.

We highly recommend this book to you and it is especially good for both beginners and intermediates.

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2. The Ruby Programming Language

The Ruby Programming Language is a comprehensive book. This book covers the basic to advanced level knowledge of Ruby.

You will learn about the structure and execution of Ruby programs, datatypes and objects, expressions and operators, statements and control structures, methods, procs, lambdas, closures, classes, modules, reflection, metaprogramming, Ruby platform, and the Ruby environment.

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3. The Well-Grounded Rubyist

*The Well-Grounded Rubyist by David A. Black and Joseph Leo III*

The Well-Grounded Rubyist is suitable for both newbies and intermediate programmers and coders.

If you’re just thinking of starting with Ruby then this book is for you. However, if you have been using Ruby for a long time, this book will still be useful for you.

You will learn about the basics of Ruby syntax and then in later chapters about reflection, threading, recursion, and file and I/O operation, etc.

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4. Ruby For Beginners: Your Guide To Easily Learn Ruby Programming in 7 days

Ruby for Beginners is a great book for programming in Ruby language.

This book is most suitable for you if you are a beginner in Ruby programming.

This book will give you a lot of practice programs or so that you can increase your confidence and experience in Ruby programming.

You will learn about the basics of Ruby, Ruby variables, methods, flow control, iterators and loops, arrays and hashes, etc.

We recommend it to anyone who wants to learn Ruby quickly.

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5. Eloquent Ruby

Eloquent Ruby is a wonderful book that will teach you how to write great Ruby code.

It is a well-organized book. It is perfect for intermediate to advanced programmers who don’t know anything about Ruby language.

In this book, you will learn how to write great code, control structures, how to use strings, expressions, and symbols, and building methods and classes, etc.

A must-read book for you, whether you are a complete novice or whether you are a Rails developer.

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Conclusion

So these are the 5 best Ruby books for beginners & advanced programmers.

We believe that the books mentioned above will help you to learn Ruby quickly and efficiently. The demand for Ruby professionals is high these days so learning Ruby will put you in good stead to utilize this opportunity.