The book, Beginning Ruby is a complete beginner’s guide to Ruby and ideal for both people who’ve not programmed before or those who’ve done a little programming but don’t understand the finer details (such as OOP, dynamic languages, or scripting).

The author, Peter Cooper of Ruby Inside fame and the publisher Apress have been kind enough to offer the eBook version of this book for just US$ 15-00 to the members of PuneRuby. However, in case you want to buy this eBook, you need to hurry as the publishers will offer this discounted price to the first 15 buyers only. For the moment, you need to have a free Paypal account to process online credit card payments. Contact me for the promotional coupon code.

Update (8th April 2007): While reading this book, I was pleasantly surprised to find mention of my Learning Ruby site under Useful Resources | Tutorials and Guides | Ruby and Techniques. Thank you Peter.

How many times have you ever needed to find just one argument of a Ruby method/function/operator or just some word of syntax while working?

The first thing you have to do is to google it or to use the index of .chm or just Ctrl+F through some manuals or pages… and as a result you have a lot of garbage and you need to search again for some useful sample or description.

On-page.net – is an attempt to reduce the garbage and give to you just what you really need.

The idea is this: only one page with information blocks. Each block can describe from one to a few keywords. All the keywords are marked (indexed) by block creator (No machine index and search! Closer to Web 3.0). Every visitor can add, modify and/or delete a block, but all changes will be pre-moderated.

As a result, you have a page where you can find a useful sample or a description of any keyword or symbol, just by typing it right in your browser. You don’t even need to use Ctrl+F… and you can navigate between keyword places via arrows or F3.

Ruby.on-page.net – is just the beginning of new level of online help. For now it is just a beta version of the engine and for only one language – Ruby (includes just some scraps from “Programming Ruby”). Now the author is trying to improve the functionality, stability and performance of the interface. Also, it must work cross-browser and support many languages and localizations. What he really needs now is your advice and ideas, or any feedback that can help him make it better and useful. Try not to concentrate on bugs and errors, but think about what is good and what is bad…

You can mail him (des7ign@gmail.com) or you can use the feedback form on the site’s page.

And you can try it right there (for now just in Firefox).

Some interesting news and articles that I thought worth mentioning:

• Ruby Mentor - The RubyMentor project aims to assist those learning Ruby, by assigning them a 1:1 mentor to guide them in their learning. This does not mean that the mentor is a teacher; the burden of learning is still on the learner, but the mentor will help the learner get to know Ruby and it’s ecosystem better and with the design and implementation of their first Ruby software. In short, this hooks up Ruby Newbies with folks who have more experience.
• Use the Ruby on Rails Alternative - When it comes to developing MVC Web applications, Ruby on Rails offers perhaps a simpler option than J2EE. Discover how to forgo JSP, HTML, servlets, and EJB when building a CRUD application.
• Google Summer of Code -
  Pat Eyler reports that the Google’s Summer of Code is about to start. Ruby Central is once again planning to act as the mentoring organization for Ruby. For Ruby to be represented again this year, they need mentors. If you’re interested in helping a college student work on a project using (or benefiting) Ruby, Ruby on Rails, JRuby, Rubinius, or any of the other insanely cool Ruby environments please send Pat an email right away. They need to get our application turned in this week. Google will post the list of mentoring organizations on March 14th. Google will be accepting student proposals March 15-24, so, if you’re a student, this is the time to start putting together a proposal. Some useful links are - The SoC FAQ, Mentors’ Page, Students’ Page.