Ruby wannabe here. (Don't ask why I'll probably never see my copy of the 'Pickaxe' book again, and _Design and Implementation..._ is begging to be bought before I replace it...)

But if I can offer some insight on 'the goat book:' It's a "...In a Nutshell." To someone familiar with the O'Reilly style, this should be a tipoff as to what it is/isn't. To someone unfamiliar, this means it is intended to be the "quick reference" described on the cover, and little else.

As such, it provides excellent documentation of the built-ins and standard library (as they stood in 2002, at least), and is probably good to have around for that, but you'll need other resources to get you structuring those statements into a useful Ruby program...

...and since I don't *have* my Pickaxe book around, I can't tell you how much is already documented there anyway.

So, overall opinion is: Can't hurt to have it on your desk, but it's not a magic bullet to fluency... More of a dictionary/thesaurus, if you can already figure out what you want to 'say.' First printings are now kicking around for $1.99 at Ocean State Job Lots; I have no idea if it's been revised since.

[Something not to do: Sit down after 12 months of not thinking about the language, armed with nothing but a copy of this and a conviction that it shouldn't be *too* hard to cook up a one-liner to initialize an array of random integers. Ow.]