''why's (poignant) Guide to Ruby'', sometimes called ''w(p)GtR'' or just "the poignant guide", is an introductory book to the

Ruby programming language Ruby is an interpreted, high-level, general-purpose programming language which supports multiple programming paradigms. It was designed with an emphasis on programming productivity and simplicity. In Ruby, everything is an object, including p ...

, written by

why the lucky stiff Jonathan Gillette, known by the pseudonym why the lucky stiff (often abbreviated as _why), is a writer, cartoonist, artist, and programmer notable for his work with the Ruby programming language. Annie Lowrey described him as "one of the most ...

. The book is distributed under the

Creative Commons Creative Commons (CC) is an American non-profit organization and international network devoted to educational access and expanding the range of creative works available for others to build upon legally and to share. The organization has releas ...

Attribution-ShareAlike license. The book is unusual among programming books in that it includes much strange humor and many narrative side tracks which are sometimes completely unrelated to the topic. Many motifs have become inside jokes in the Ruby community, such as references to the words "chunky bacon". The book includes many characters which have become popular as well, particularly the cartoon

fox Foxes are small to medium-sized, omnivorous mammals belonging to several genera of the family Canidae. They have a flattened skull, upright, triangular ears, a pointed, slightly upturned snout, and a long bushy tail (or ''brush''). Twelv ...

es and ''Trady Blix'', a large black feline friend of why's, who acts as a guide to the foxes (and occasionally teaches them some Ruby). The book is published in

HTML The HyperText Markup Language or HTML is the standard markup language for documents designed to be displayed in a web browser. It can be assisted by technologies such as Cascading Style Sheets (CSS) and scripting languages such as JavaScri ...

and

PDF Portable Document Format (PDF), standardized as ISO 32000, is a file format developed by Adobe in 1992 to present documents, including text formatting and images, in a manner independent of application software, hardware, and operating systems. ...

. Chapter three was reprinted in ''The Best Software Writing I: Selected and Introduced by

Joel Spolsky Avram Joel Spolsky (born 1965) is a software engineer and writer. He is the author of ''Joel on Software'', a blog on software development, and the creator of the project management software Trello. He was a Program Manager on the Microsoft Excel ...

'' (Apress, 2005).

# About this book # Kon'nichi wa, Ruby # A Quick (and Hopefully Painless) Ride Through Ruby (with Cartoon Foxes): basic introduction to central Ruby concepts # Floating Little Leaves of Code: evaluation and values, hashes and lists # Them What Make the Rules and Them What Live the Dream: case/when, while/until, variable scope, blocks, methods, class definitions, class attributes, objects, modules, introspection in IRB, dup, self, module # Downtown:

metaprogramming Metaprogramming is a programming technique in which computer programs have the ability to treat other programs as their data. It means that a program can be designed to read, generate, analyze or transform other programs, and even modify itself ...

regular expression A regular expression (shortened as regex or regexp; sometimes referred to as rational expression) is a sequence of characters that specifies a search pattern in text. Usually such patterns are used by string-searching algorithms for "find" ...

s # When You Wish Upon a Beard: send method, new methods in existing classes The following chapters are "Expansion Packs": # The Tiger's Vest (with a Basic Introduction to IRB): discusses IRB, the interactive Ruby interpreter.

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Contents

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