Off to the Printer

The Ruby Programming Language was sent to the printer on Friday the 11th, and should be printed and bound on Monday January 21st. This is on schedule. Amazon still says that they expect to start fulfilling orders on January 24th. I don't know the logistics of getting copies from the printer to Amazon, but it seems likely that they can meet (or come close) to that date.

I've uploaded a pdf of the final frontmatter in case you'd like to browse the table of contents to see what material I cover. (My older, homebrew TOC is a little out of date but includes 2nd-level section titles as well as the top-level sections, so it gives quite a bit more detail about the book's contents.)

I've seen the book get as high as #64 on Amazon's list of bestselling programming books even before it is released. It's fallen off the list today, but if you pre-order it now, maybe it will come back on! :-)

Update: In the comments, Adriano asks a good (and common) question about the stability of Ruby 1.9. I'm posting my response here:

Adriano,

Thanks for your comment. I hope my book can meet your expectations! I should make clear that this book is a language reference, but not an API reference. Unlike my JavaScript book, there is not a section that documents each class and method of the core library. (Though there is a long example-based chapter that demonstrates the most important classes of the core library.)

Matz has changed the release numbering scheme for this release of Ruby. 1.9.x will be a stable version of the language, not a development version, despite the fact that 9 is an odd number. The original intent, I believe, was to release 1.9.1 on Christmas. But the code was not stable enough. So Matz's Christmas release is still called 1.9.0, and is effectively a beta-release of 1.9. Matz does not yet recommend it for production use, but it is stable enough to begin porting applications to.

The Christmas release of 1.9.0 was nominally an API freeze as well. There have been, and will continue to be minor API changes between 1.9.0 and 1.9.1, but there shouldn't be many of them: the intent is to keep the API frozen.

My book went to the printer after the Christmas release, so it covers everything that was in the frozen 1.9.0 release, and even a couple of changes that happened after the release. I may have to release a few errata when 1.9.1 comes out, but overall, this book should have very complete coverage of 1.9.x