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

Ruby (programming language)

Ruby is a dynamic, reflective, general-purpose object-oriented programming language that combines syntax inspired by Perl with Smalltalk-like features. Ruby originated in Japan during the mid-1990s and was first developed and designed by Yukihiro "Matz" Matsumoto...

, written by why the lucky stiff

Why the lucky stiff

why the lucky stiff is the persona formerly used by an anonymous and prolific writer, cartoonist, musician, artist, and computer programmer notable for his work with the Ruby programming language...

. The book is distributed under the Creative Commons

Creative Commons

Creative Commons is a non-profit organization headquartered in Mountain View, California, United States devoted to expanding the range of creative works available for others to build upon legally and to share. The organization has released several copyright-licenses known as Creative Commons...

 Attribution-ShareAlike license.

The book is unusual among programming books in that it includes quite a lot of strange humour and 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

Fox

Fox is a common name for many species of omnivorous mammals belonging to the Canidae family. Foxes are small to medium-sized canids , characterized by possessing a long narrow snout, and a bushy tail .Members of about 37 species are referred to as foxes, of which only 12 species actually belong to...

es and Trady Blix, a large black feline friend of why

Why the lucky stiff

why the lucky stiff is the persona formerly used by an anonymous and prolific writer, cartoonist, musician, artist, and computer programmer notable for his work with the Ruby programming language...

's, who acts as a guide to the foxes (and occasionally teaches them some Ruby).

The book is published in HTML

HTML

HyperText Markup Language is the predominant markup language for web pages. HTML elements are the basic building-blocks of webpages....

 and PDF

Portable Document Format

Portable Document Format is an open standard for document exchange. This file format, created by Adobe Systems in 1993, is used for representing documents 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

Joel Spolsky

Avram Joel Spolsky is a software engineer and writer. He is the author of Joel on Software, a blog on software development. He was a Program Manager on the Microsoft Excel team between 1991 and 1994. He later founded Fog Creek Software in 2000 and launched the Joel on Software blog...

(Apress, 2005).

Why's (poignant) Guide to Ruby was singled out by Mathew Huntbach in his disparaging articlehttp://www.bitwisemag.com/2/What-s-Wrong-With-Ruby about Ruby as a "particularly horrid example" of the "many cutesy tutorials" of Ruby language he encountered.

Chapters

The book itself is incomplete and new chapters appear from time to time.

1. About this book
2. Kon'nichi wa, Ruby
3. A Quick (and Hopefully Painless) Ride Through Ruby (with Cartoon Foxes) – basic introduction to central Ruby concepts
4. Floating Little Leaves of Code – evaluation and values, hashes
   Associative array
   In computer science, an associative array is an abstract data type composed of a collection of pairs, such that each possible key appears at most once in the collection....
   
    and lists
5. 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
   Interactive Ruby Shell
   Interactive Ruby Shell is a shell for programming in the object-oriented scripting language Ruby. The program is launched from a command line and allows the execution of Ruby commands with immediate response, experimenting in real-time...
   
   , dup, self, rbconfig module
6. Downtown – metaprogramming
   Metaprogramming
   Metaprogramming is the writing of computer programs that write or manipulate other programs as their data, or that do part of the work at compile time that would otherwise be done at runtime...
   
   , regular expression
   Regular expression
   In computing, a regular expression provides a concise and flexible means for "matching" strings of text, such as particular characters, words, or patterns of characters. Abbreviations for "regular expression" include "regex" and "regexp"...
   
   s
7. When You Wish Upon a Beard – send method, new methods in existing classes
8. Heaven’s Harp

The following chapters are "Expansion Paks":

1. The Tiger’s Vest (with a Basic Introduction to IRB) – discusses IRB, the interactive Ruby interpreter.

External links

The guide was at www.poignantguide.net/ruby/ but it was taken offline on August 19th, 2009 along with much of the author's online presence. By June of 2011, the domain is parked.
However, there are mirrors:

• why's (poignant) Guide to Ruby Mirror of the guide on Scribd
  Scribd
  Scribd is a Web 2.0 based document-sharing website which allows users to post documents of various formats, and embed them into a web page using its iPaper format. Scribd was founded by Trip Adler, Tikhon Bernstam, and Jared Friedman in 2006...
  
  .
• why's (poignant) Guide to Ruby Mirror of the guide, PDF version.
• why's (poignant) Guide to Ruby Mirror of the guide, alternative PDF version (book format).
• why's (poignant) Guide to Ruby Mirror of the guide, html version.
• why's (poignant) Guide to Ruby Mirror of the guide, ePub version.
• why's (poignant) Guide to Ruby Mirror of the guide, mobi
  Mobipocket
  Mobipocket SA is a French company incorporated in March 2000 which produces Mobipocket Reader software, an E-Book reader for some PDAs, phones and desktop operating systems....
  
   (Kindle
  Amazon Kindle
  The Amazon Kindle is an e-book reader developed by Amazon.com subsidiary Lab126 which uses wireless connectivity to enable users to shop for, download, browse, and read e-books, newspapers, magazines, blogs, and other digital media...
  
  ) version.