This is a draft book titled A Little Ruby, A Lot of Objects. It's in the style of Friedman and Felleisen's wonderful The Little Lisper (now called The Little Schemer), but on a different topic. From the preface:

Welcome to my little book. In it, my goal is to teach you a way to think about computation, to show you how far you can take a simple idea: that all computation consists of sending messages to objects. Object-oriented programming is no longer unusual, but taking it to the extreme - making everything an object - is still supported by only a few programming languages.

Can I justify this book in practical terms? Will reading it make you a better programmer, even if you never use "call with current continuation" or indulge in "metaclass hackery"? I think it might, but perhaps only if you're the sort of person who would read this sort of book even if it had no practical value.

The real reason for reading this book is that the ideas in it are neat. There's an intellectual heritage here, a history of people building idea upon idea. It's an academic heritage, but not in the fussy sense. It's more a joyous heritage of tinkerers, of people buttonholing their friends and saying, "You know, if I take that and think about it like this, look what I can do!"

Table of Contents

All the chapters are in PDF format.

1. Preface (last updated October 6, 2001)
2. Chapter 1, objects and classes (last updated December 8, 2001)
3. Chapter 2, protocols and inheritance (last updated December 8, 2001)
4. Chapter 3, metaclass hackery (last updated December 8, 2001)
5. ...

Source for the Examples

• Tar format
• Zip format

Mailing List

I will announce new chapters and revised chapters to the Little Ruby mailing list. You can join through the YahooGroups page or by sending mail to little-ruby-subscribe@yahoogroups.com. (The mail to that address doesn't have to be formatted in any particular way - no need to put 'subscribe' in the subject, etc.)