One problem I experience when learning new languages is that while it's easy to plough through a book and feel pretty smart at the end.. when you come to writing code, you start to realize you need to read all that stuff again a few times until it sinks in. With that in mind, I'd recommend Satish Talim's bumper collection of Ruby tutorials that cover similar ground to Programming Ruby but, naturally, approach things from a slightly different direction. Seeing it all over again is more likely to get the knowledge to stick. Peter Cooper is the author of 'Beginning Ruby' book.

Thanks a lot for your work on "Learning Ruby"! The guide is very concise and understandable and helps me very much with my efforts on getting familiar with Ruby.

Thank you for your awesome Ruby tutorial. Your explanations are clear and direct. Your tutorial really helped me understand the underlying principles and core concepts. Also you cover some best practices and comparisons for Ruby newbies from the Java community like me, and this really helped me a lot.

I am new to Ruby. I am going through your rubylearning.com site. In my opinion, the site is a must for Ruby beginners. You have mentioned all the things and covered all the topics. Most of all, and which I think is important, is that you have explained all the topics with examples. I would like to thank you for providing us this invaluable resource.

Thanks a lot for your really good tutorial!!!
I started learning Ruby a couple of months ago; read a lot of articles, tutorials,... and I finally found yours. The tutorial is really detailed and made me really want to go deeper into this language. I cannot use Ruby at work, I do not have the opportunity, well... except for a couple of short scripts every time I can. I really want to dive deeper in the Ruby world and I thank you once again for your work!!

Thanks for the great tutorial. I've found your site the most friendly for a person new to programming as well as new to Ruby.

I appreciate your presentation on Ruby. I've come across many distinguished eBooks but your Tutorial is phenomenonal. I'm a Civil Engineer working and raised in Tanzania, East Africa. Ruby will help me in the repetitive calculations in this profession.

Your Ruby Study Notes eBook is really great! The way I'm using it to study is, through jEdit with some useful plugins like ProjectViewer, Ruby Console and more, so that I can go by the chapters easily in the PDF, look at the code inside jEdit and run the command in the ruby studies folder from your zipped programs. It couldn't be easier to study. I also think your eBook is really great and complete. Most chapters are tiny and with small examples, but the way you explain them is very clear and objective! Well Satish, I only have to thank you for the great eBook and for your kind support.

Frankly speaking, I would not have started learning yet another programming language, if I had not found rubylearning.com. Afterwards I cannot say, why no other tutorial could keep my attention for long enough to spark my interest. Finally I am happy to stay with the little Ruby community, that evolves around the site and its online class and am casually becoming productive with Ruby. You made me first comprehend the basics of a language which is very different from those, I knew before, and in the end curious for my future Ruby-adventures. OMG, I am a programmer...

I would like to thank you very much! "The Free Online Ruby Programming Course" and the "Free Study Notes on Ruby" helped me a lot. I think that your book/course is very well designed and complete. The chapters sequence/content was arranged in a very didactic way. Short texts merged with simple examples clearly explain the concepts in each lesson. The exercices point to key concepts, and help the learning process a lot. In my opinion, your ebook is a "must-read" for anyone who wants to learn Ruby. Congratulations!

I am very happy and satisfied to have taken your Free Online Ruby programming course. This course helped me get a grasp on Ruby. The course is very interesting and I would recommend the same very strongly.

I am very happy of my knowledge of Ruby, after I underwent your Ruby course! The course that Satish provided us is simply fantastic and I had a lot of fun learning Ruby along with hundreds of other participants. I feel that the best way to learn Ruby programming is to take this Free Online course provided by Satish. Congratulations!

The Free Online Ruby Programming Course, gave me a fantastic opportunity to revise the theory and try it in practice.

I never trusted these online courses and thought they could never be as good and as comprehensive as normal presencial courses. But since these are generally very expensive, I found Satish's free online course and signed up for a test. By the end of the fourth week I had already changed my mind completely. The course is totally serious and I have learned a lot, even more than if it was presencial. Satish is a great teacher and always helped me when I needed. I'm sure that any person who enrolls for the new batches will learn as much as (or more than) I did.

I've learned Pascal, C, LISP, C++, Java and other languages while I was at the University. When I started working I had to learn - on the job training - Delphi, and from then on I realized that most programming languages are more or less easy to learn if one invests time and has a book or some source of information to get started. This way I’ve learned Perl, PHP, PL/SQL and a small set of others. But in doing so I never really felt that I had properly learned about each one. And I was afraid that the same thing would happen to me while learning by following online books, articles and other references. Until... until I stumbled on a link that pointed out to a Free Online Course for Ruby. Being online was a major advantage for me, due to time constraints, and being free was a plus since money is short and my company only invests in "well-known" languages. The first 2 to 3 weeks, after the course started, I was mostly on "reading-mode" in the forums and was satisfied to accomplish the exercises and quiz. Until, due to some discussion in a thread, I realized that I had to participate more, and more often, in the forums. By doing so then suddenly, easily, almost without realizing I started to feel that I’m really learning how to code in Ruby. And that what I learn makes sense even when applied in other scenarios instead of being just a huge pile of "glued blocks of code". It's code that I can re-use, that I understand - probably more than in other languages - and that is fun. That is indeed a major advantage of Ruby: coding is fun! And as Marcos and others have mentioned: this course is about participation and sharing, to which I add "discuss" as well. One final word to thank Satish, for his dedication, efforts and commitment in the success of this online course and to thank the community of participants, from teachers to students (which is growing and I'm so glad to be a part of it).

After learning about Ruby at 2006 NFJS conference, I bought books, subscribed to Ruby/Rails podcasts, and attended Atlanta Ruby user group, but did not spend much time learning or using the language. When I saw the course announcement this January (2008), I knew the structure of a class would help me, so I signed up immediately. This is much more than a course - this is a "open-source" community of sharing regular training material/exercises/quizzes and of contributing to each other learning through blogs, wikis, forums, and emails. As an example, in addition to read the material and doing the exercises and course project, I have contributed through exercise solutions, course ideas, unit tests, and external references (i.e., Google Summer of Code, 99 Problems Solutions). I have really enjoyed it and invite everyone to come and join our growing Ruby community in learning and sharing.

The collaborative work existed long before the Internet was created but its creation was responsible for increasing interaction amongst people very distant from each other. Free software came from it. Among free software, we have Ruby and Ruby on Rails. This course reflects exactly this ideology: Collaborative work. I'm new to Ruby and the course was a very good start to this amazing language. The studying notes, the discussion forums, the exercises, the teacher's work and specially the students, make this a very good place for learning the language basics and new programming techniques through collaborative work. I'd like to thank Satish for this resource.

I just wanted to thank you for teaching the Ruby course. I learned a lot, plus the course spurred me to do a lot of extra reading and branching off on my own. My real work load caught up with me about 3 weeks ago, so I had to reduce my time spent on Ruby. However, I now use Ruby whenever I want to tackle a new problem, that I would have done in other languages (VB.Net or Cache). For example, I am a big fantasy sports fan and help run a league. Every year, we create new team divisions which has been a manual, time consuming process. However, with Ruby, I was able to write code that will automate this process so that it only take a few minutes tops to input the parameters and then seconds to generate the teams for each division.

This was my first experience with online programming courses. I started to learn Ruby before I heard about rubylearning.org, but for me it was a problem to start from the beginning and have all the basic concepts and technics of the language lined up and grasped in a nice sequence of lessons. To cover up everything I needed some external motivation - this course made me do it, and I am happy now because I have a better understanding of the whole picture of the Ruby programming language. This will help me in the future. Participants and Satish Talim as the host were really responsive and gave me a hand when I was struggling with some misunderstandings or would stumble against issues I could not fully grasp. That is the strongest side of this course - helpful and friendly community. My colleagues made me feel very comfortable here and showed me one more time that learning and coding in Ruby _is_ fun! And the more fun it is, the more productive you are and everyone is happy.

I am glad for having had this opportunity to study Ruby with Satish and so many other outstanding programmers. Their collective input has given me many insights that I would never have garnered simply from reading Ruby books (which I now have done). As a beginner (both with Ruby and programming), I knew that the road to learning would be a steep upward climb...but it has been leveled considerably by the format and structure of this course, and mostly by reading the forum discussions! What wonderful, lively and engaging discussions of the coding world of Ruby. I am glad I learned enough Ruby to appreciate these discussions and hopefully in the near future my Ruby prowess will allow me to contribute as well... I think the learning revolution via Internet is starting to gather momentum and Satish is definitely pioneering this movement with his engaging Ruby learning courses. Many thanks and I now, thanks to this course, have Ruby running in my veins...and hopefully pumping life into my programming attempts to put Ruby to work in the information dense world of the life sciences. Many thanks for a wonderful learning experience!

This course was "the chance of my life with programming languages." I have tried to learn Ruby before this course, but that way it was hard for me. In this course, when I solved a given exercise, I was also able to read other people's programs and that helped me improve my code. If you are a beginner in Ruby, this course is the best way to improve yourself. I want to thank you, Satish Talim, for this wonderful course and your immense patience with us. Also I want to thank the assistant teachers for pointing out the problems in our code and helping us write better Ruby code.

I liked this course because: (a) I could see the code of other programmers (b) I could improve my knowledge of Ruby (c) I had regular exercices to do (d) The publicly accessible theory note were concise and helpful. Thank you Mr. Talim and the people who partiticated in this course.

Well, I really enjoyed the progress of the course. These 3 months of learning was really appreciated, I thought it would be much more difficult to learn Ruby, but with the help of the asst. teachers at the forums and the help of Satish course and exercises, it was quite easy. I will subscribe to the next batch as I know that the course becomes better with each new batch, as new and better things are added. To everyone who participated, a big hug.

What can I say about this course? It is not just a course really. It is Satish’s passionate project, and after a while it has become ours too. I am still following the subsequent batches, learning more and more. I have made a lot of friends with diferent skills and view-points. This was and still being, one of the most important experiences in my life. Thank you Satish, my real Ruby Guru. And thank you all the folks of the various batches.

Satish Talim's Ruby programming course helped me a lot. One thing I liked about it is that assignments solutions / answers are sent in by different participants; everybody had a different view to solve a problem. I saw solutions that I had not thought in that way. Everybody was enthusiastic. I think this course is unique in its kind. Every programming language learner should never miss a chance to participate in this course. I even had enrolled for second course. The best thing is, it is free.

This course not only taught me how to code in Ruby but also taught me how to ENJOY the art of coding. Our professor, Satish Talim, helped us every time we needed help, gave us links, reading material, fast answers in the forums and so much more. Talking about the forums, they were the best part for me: lots of people, different experiences, doing the same course, sharing code and comments, having fun, helping others... it was really, really good! I recommend the course for everyone! You'll have a great time there!