What are some good online tutorials/quick starts/screencasts to get up to speed on Ruby development? I recently read Brad Wilson's Ruby article in the Sep/Oct 2008 issue of CoDe magazine and would like to continue down the Ruby/IronRuby path.
(My background is mainly C# and .NET.)
You buy the Programming Ruby - Pickaxe book
OR for a non-orthodox entry
Why's Poignant guide to Ruby
Ruby is one of my favorite languages, here's a few places to start.
Why's Poignant Guide To Ruby is pretty hilarious and educational.
Ruby Documentation has lots of links.
Programming Ruby is a free, online version of one of the best Ruby books out there.
I'd highly recommend why's (poignant) guide to ruby. It's both informative, funny, and nothing like any programming book you've ever read. Oh and it's free. :)
Also great to read is Agile Web Development with Rails
You should check out The Ruby Way by Hal Fulton. It is one of the best Ruby books out there. It should be able to answer most of your Ruby questions when starting out.
Huw Collingbourne's Book Of Ruby is a work-in-progress but quite decent as far as it goes.
Otherwise, grab the One-Click Installer (assuming you're on Windows) and have a go. Digging around the ruby-lang.org Documentation page will get you more stuff than you can probably stand.
If you're behind a proxy server and want to try out some of the goodness that is rubygems (easy-to-download libraries, very cool), you may need extra authentication help from RubySSPI without which the gem library can struggle to get to the interwebs.
Mr. Neighborly's Humble Little Ruby Book is a nice introduction to the language. It's well-written with a chatty, witty style.
You should checkout "Interactive Programming Books" from http://roorky.com. The interactive books(iPUBs) can be a very good start to learn new language like Ruby and Python. They have a reader which can be used to execute code snippets while reading the book itself.
-- PK