1. What this book's about : Why learn programming (and why Ruby)? ; All adults on deck: installing Ruby ; Achievement unlocked: Ruby installed! ; Putting on the Ruby slippers ; Getting to know IRB ; Using a text editor and the Ruby command ; When to use IRB and when to use a text editor ; The prompts used in this book ; Into the shiny red yonder -- 2. The king and his string : A short yarn ; A bit more about variables ; Ruby operators ; A smallish project for you -- 3. Pipe dreams : The apprentice plumber's dilemma ; Writing and running Ruby scripts ; His majesty's flow control ; Improving flow_rate.rb with fancier logical operators ; A biggerish project for you -- 4. Staying in the loop : Ruby on monorails ; While loops ; Arrays ; Putting arrays and loops into action ; Your project, should you choose to accept it -- 5. Array of sunshine and hash on the range : Big Hank's hashery ; Arrays within arrays ; Even more array methods! ; Shift! Pop! Insert! ; Iterating with arrays ; Hash in the hashery ; Rollicking ranges ; Order up! -- 6. The (chunky) bacon to Ruby's hash : Symbols! ; The skinny on symbols ; Symbols and hashes, together at last ; The mid-morning rush ; What else can you do with symbols? -- 7. The magic of methods and blocks : A method to the madness ; Defining your own methods ; What is nil? ; Splat parameters ; Block methods ; Into the dagron's lair -- 8. Everything is an object (almost) : The subject of our story is an object ; Classes and objects ; Creating our first class, minstrel ; Variable scope ; Objects and self ; Methods and instance variables ; Dial-a-ballad, or the minstrel's delivery service -- 9. Inheriting the magic of Ruby : Her majesty's managerie ; A brush-up on classes ; Subclass and superclass ; Protecting the kingdom with GuardDogs and FlyingMonkeys ; The queen's machine -- 10. A horse of a different color : Utter panda-monium ; Creating modules ; Constants ; Extending your knowledge ; Mixins and inheritance ; Requiring another file ; Looking up constants ; A horse of a different color -- 11. Second time's the charm : Refactoring at the refactory ; Variable assignment tricks ; Crystal-clear conditionals ; When you need a case statement ; Simplifying methods ; De-duplicating code ; Re-refactoring -- 12. Reading, writing, and Ruby magic : File input and output ; Opening a file with Ruby ; Writing and adding to files ; Avoiding errors while working with files ; All loading docks, report for duty! -- 13. Follow the WEBrick road : Ruby and the Internet ; Using the open-uri Ruby Gem ; Investigating the kingdom's web server ; Beyond the kingdom walls -- 14. Where to go next : The big picture: what you know ; Additional resources and further reading ; Online and multimedia ; Additional topics -- A. Installing Ruby on Mac and Linux : Installing on Mac ; Installing on Linux -- B. Troubleshooting : Errors running Ruby scripts ; Errors using IRB.