The central theme of this book, to me: programming should be fun. Have fun.<p>The Poignant Guide is how I learned Ruby and remains my favorite technical book. If you're at all curious about Ruby as a language, spend some time reading the first few pages (or just browse the comics). There's much more to Ruby than Rails - if you've no interest in web dev, or just want to hack around, you will be right at home.
This is programming for the type of person who cannot retain information from blobs of code and small text snippets(ie. All programming books)<p>You find these sort of things in the little schemer and such.I loved hist first guide and it taught me alot.
I love ruby, but reading why's guides didn't help me at all when I learned ruby. I liked them though, but it didn't help me understand anything, more like watching an episode of Professor Baltazar - fun and incomprehensible.
I'm afraid I have to agree with jayz's dead comment: "obnoxiously twee" is a pretty good description of this guy's writing style.<p>I'm sure some people like it, but I'm not one of them.