Meet Ruby

The Ruby book that never gets old — updated with every major release, free forever for everyone who buys it. Written by the author of the first Ruby book ever published in Brazil, and believed to be the first book worldwide to cover RubyLLM. Now in English for the first time.

Eustáquio Rangel de Oliveira Jr.

The Ruby book that never gets old — updated with every major release, free forever for everyone who buys it. Written by the author of the first Ruby book ever published in Brazil, and believed to be the first book worldwide to cover RubyLLM. Now in English for the first time.

This book is a translation into English of Conhecendo Ruby which was originally written in Portuguese (Brazilian)

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About

About the Book

Meet Ruby — The book that grows with the language.

For over 20 years, this book has been the definitive Ruby reference for thousands of Brazilian developers. Written, maintained and updated since the early days of Ruby in Brazil — when almost nothing existed in Portuguese — it became the foundation for a generation of Ruby developers in the country.

Now, for the first time, it's available in English.

This isn't a snapshot. It's a living book.

Most technical books are written once and slowly become obsolete. Meet Ruby works differently. Every major Ruby release brings a new updated edition — and everyone who bought it receives the new version automatically, at no extra cost. No subscriptions. No upgrade fees. No hunting for the latest version. Buy once, stay current forever.

Beyond the annual updates, smaller revisions, corrections and new content are added throughout the year as the language evolves and the community grows.

What's inside

At more than 600 pages, Meet Ruby covers Ruby in depth — from the fundamentals to advanced topics that most books haven't touched yet:

Believed to be the first book worldwide to cover RubyLLM, still adding more content!
Among the first books covering Ractors, Ruby's modern concurrency model

This is a book written by someone who has been using, teaching and writing about Ruby for over two decades — not assembled from documentation.

A commitment you can count on

I've maintained this book in Portuguese for over 20 years without abandoning it. That track record isn't accidental — it reflects how seriously I take the responsibility of being someone's primary Ruby reference.

For the English edition, I'm formally committing to at least 5 years of active maintenance and updates, conditioned on my health and well-being. If circumstances ever change, you'll be informed transparently and promptly. No surprises.

About the author

I'm the author of the first Ruby book ever published in Brazil. I've been writing, teaching and working with Ruby since the early 2000s — through every major version, every shift in the ecosystem, and every wave of new tooling. Meet Ruby is the distillation of all of that experience.

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This book is a translation into English of Conhecendo Ruby which was originally written in Portuguese (Brazilian)

Author

About the Author

Eustáquio Rangel de Oliveira Jr.

I've been working with Ruby since the early 2000s — before it was fashionable, before Rails made it mainstream, and long before most of the ecosystem we know today existed.

Over the past 20+ years I've trained developers across dozens of companies, delivered talks in the Ruby community, contributed to open source projects, and built production systems across a wide range of industries. The kind of experience that doesn't come from reading documentation — it comes from being in the trenches when things break, when requirements change, and when the language itself evolves under your feet.

I'm also the author of the first Ruby book ever published in Brazil, which I've maintained and updated continuously since it launched — not as a side project, but as a professional commitment to the community that trusted me.

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Table of Contents

About this book
Ruby
1. What is Ruby?
2. Philosophy and Principles
3. Practical Characteristics
4. Installing Ruby
  1. Ubuntu
  2. OSX
  3. Windows
  4. RVM
    1. Installing a Ruby interpreter
Language Basics
1. Dynamic typing
2. Strong typing
3. Basic types
  1. Integers
    1. Fixnums
    2. Bignums
  2. Floating point
  3. BigDecimals
  4. Dates
  5. Times
  6. Rationals
  7. Booleans
  8. Nil
  9. Strings
  10. Substrings
  11. Concatenating Strings
  12. Encodings
  13. Variables are references in memory
  14. Freezing objects explicitly
  15. Some String methods and tricks
  16. Symbols
    1. The philosophy of symbols
  17. Regular expressions
    1. Groups
    2. Named groups
    3. Accented characters
    4. Timeout
  18. Arrays
  19. Duck Typing
  20. Sets
  21. Ranges
  22. Hashes
  23. Code blocks
  24. Type conversions
  25. Base conversions
  26. Exception handling
    1. Raising exceptions
    2. Discovering the previous exception
    3. Creating our own exceptions
    4. Comparing exceptions
    5. Using catch and throw
4. Control structures
  1. Conditionals
    1. if
    2. unless
    3. case
  2. Pattern matching
  3. Loops
    1. Magic comments
    2. while
    3. for
    4. until
  4. Operators
    1. Arithmetic operators
    2. Assignment operators
    3. Unary operators
    4. Logical operators
    5. Splat
    6. Bitwise operators
5. Procs and lambdas
6. Iterators
  1. Selecting elements
  2. Selecting elements that do not meet a condition
  3. Processing and modifying elements
  4. Detecting a condition in all elements
  5. Detecting if any element meets a condition
  6. Detecting and returning the first element that meets a condition
  7. Detecting maximum and minimum values
  8. Accumulating elements
  9. Splitting the collection into two Arrays based on a condition
  10. Traversing elements with their indices
  11. Sorting a collection
  12. Combining elements
  13. Traversing values upward and downward
  14. Filtering with grep
  15. Chaining iterators
  16. Random numbers
7. Methods
  1. Returning values
  2. Sending values
  3. Sending and processing blocks and Procs
  4. Values are passed by reference
  5. Intercepting exceptions directly in the method
  6. Destructive and predicate methods
8. Sending options on the command line
Classes and objects
1. Open classes
2. Aliases
3. Inserting and removing methods
4. Inheritance
5. Shallow and deep copying
6. Metaclasses
7. Class variables
8. Fluent interfaces
9. DSLs
10. Class instance variables
11. Playing with dynamic methods and hooks
12. Delegation
13. Operator-like methods
14. Closures
15. Static typing support
  1. Generating the RBS file
  2. Checking the types
16. Prism
Modules
1. Mixins
  1. Composition versus inheritance
  2. Where methods are inserted
  3. Modules extending themselves
  4. Implementing singletons
  5. Refinements
2. Namespaces
3. TracePoint
4. Ruby::Box
RubyGems
1. Installing manually
2. Commands
3. Using the installed gem
4. Using memoization with the gem
5. Managing with a Gemfile
6. Tail call optimization
Threads
1. Threads
  1. Sending Procs
  2. Mutexes
  3. Queues
  4. Canceling
  5. Intercepting signals
2. Fibers
3. Continuations
4. Parallel processes
5. Benchmarks
  1. Measuring time
  2. Seeing where time is spent
6. Ractors
  1. Understanding the Actor Model
  2. Getting to know Ractor::Port
  3. Reusing Ports
  4. Isolation
  5. Waiting
  6. Copying and moving
  7. Creating pools
  8. Checking parallelism
  9. Sharing Procs and lambdas
  10. Error handling
  11. Recommendations
  12. Choosing between Threads, Fibers and Ractors
JIT
1. MJIT
2. RJIT
3. Enabling YJIT
4. ZJIT
Input and output
1. Files
  1. FileUtils
  2. Zip files
  3. CSV
    1. Creating
    2. Reading
  4. XML
  5. XSLT
  6. JSON
  7. YAML
2. Network protocols
  1. TCP
  2. UDP
  3. SMTP
  4. POP3
  5. FTP
  6. HTTP
  7. HTTPS
  8. SSH
3. Operating system processes
  1. Backticks
  2. System
  3. Exec
  4. IO.popen
  5. Open3
4. XML-RPC
  1. Python
  2. PHP
  3. Java
JRuby
1. Using Java classes from inside Ruby
2. Using Ruby classes inside Java
Databases
1. Installing the necessary gems
2. Opening the connection
3. Executing queries
4. Queries that do not return data
5. Updating a record
6. Deleting a record
7. Queries that return data
8. Prepared statements
9. Metadata
10. ActiveRecord
C extensions
1. Using external libs
  1. Writing the C code of the lib
2. Using the shared lib
Garbage collector
1. Phase 1: Initial State
2. Phase 2: Unreachable Object
3. Phase 3: Mark Phase
4. Phase 4: Sweep Phase
5. Heap Structure
  1. Young Space
  2. Old Space
6. Types of collection
  1. Minor GC
  2. Major GC
  3. Object promotion
7. This is not a C book, but ...
8. This is still not a C book, but ...
  1. A small detail: not every String uses malloc/free
Testing
1. Starting with the classic API
2. Failing
3. Pending
4. Omitted
5. Notifications
6. Assertions
7. Modernizing the tests
  1. Randomizing the tests
  2. Testing with specs
  3. Benchmarks
8. Mocks
9. Stubs
10. Expectations
11. Different output formats
12. Debugging
13. Continuous testing
  1. Running tests automatically
  2. Running only selected tests
Building gems
1. Creating the gem
2. Testing the gem
3. Building the gem
4. Publishing the gem
  1. Publishing locally
  2. Publishing to the official repository
5. Extracting a gem
6. Signing a gem
  1. Creating a certificate
  2. Adapting the gem to use the certificate
  3. Building and publishing the signed gem
  4. Using the signed gem
  5. Always using signed gems
Rake
1. Defining a task
2. Namespaces
3. Dependent tasks
4. Running tasks in other programs
5. Different files
6. Tasks with file names
7. Tasks with file lists
8. Rules
9. Extending
AI
1. The RubyLLM gem
  1. Creating a chat
    1. Text chat
    2. Interpreting an image
    3. Interpreting a video
    4. Interpreting a document
    5. Interpreting code
    6. Interpreting audio
    7. Using static methods
    8. Creating images
Generating documentation
1. Rdoc
2. YARD
Challenges
1. Challenge 1
2. Challenge 2
3. Challenge 3
4. Challenge 4
5. Challenge 5
6. Challenge 6
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