On August 19, 2009 Why the Lucky Stiff removed every trace of his work from the Web, including this book: the Poignant Guide to Ruby.
I've salvaged the book from the Internet archive and re-published it. The original work was under the Attribution-ShareAlike license.
Since then I have:
- Changed code examples to never generate syntax warnings
- Updated code examples to match Ruby 1.9 behavior
- Applied grammar/spelling corrections
- Updated outdated Ruby installation instructions
- Converted the HTML book into Markdown (_why originally authored it in Textile)
- Made a build system powered by Jekyll
- Enabled syntax highlighted code where previously there wasn't
Run:
script/doctorto verify that you have the necessary dependenciesscript/jekyllto build the site into "public" directoryscript/guardto start a process that auto-rebuilds and live-reloads
The individual chapters are in _posts/ directory.
There's a Japanese translation of the book, although I can't tell how up to date it is.
The original soundtrack and PDF edition are also available in the download section on GitHub.
Chapter 8: Heaven's Harp was never recovered. I suspect _why started drawing it, but never finished or published.