For those interested, the Bastard's Book of Ruby is written by Dan Nguyen, a jou...

For those interested, the Bastard's Book of Ruby is written by Dan Nguyen, a journalist and developer who works at ProPublica (http://www.propublica.org/site/author/dan_nguyen ), and the dude responsible for SOPA Opera (http://projects.propublica.org/sopa/ ).

I'm not sure how many other programming books have come up out of the news apps/NICAR world (the National Institute for Computer Assisted Reporting), but one of the reasons i like the Bastard's Book so much is that it's a really practical bent on learning to program.