Prior to joining 8th Light, I had only dabbled with Ruby by learning the syntax online and doing a few coding katas in my spare time. Although the syntax is mostly easy to understand, the one thing that really concerned me back then is the sheer variety of ways you can achieve something in Ruby. Do you use do/end or curly braces for blocks? Do you include the brackets when invoking a method? Variety is indeed one of ruby's strengths, however to a beginner it is somewhat difficult to know which way is the most idiomatic style of coding, and that can make the language seem more difficult than it perhaps is.

Russ Olsen's Eloquent Ruby answered many of the questions I had asked myself when I originally looked at ruby several months ago.  Rather than just formally describing the whole Ruby syntax at the start of the book (which I have seen in many programming books), it is instead structured in sections that describe a certain part of the language (i.e. conditions, blocks, metaprogramming, etc). It describes what idiomatic Ruby code looks like, as well as the reason why rubyists choose to do things the way they do.

Not only does it provide a gold mine of information, but its style is also highly engaging which makes it very easy to consume. I'd highly recommend this to anyone who is just starting out on ruby and needs a bit of clarity on how to write idiomatic ruby.