Welcome to Ruby in Practice!

This source code distribution is a companion to the book Ruby in Practice
available from Manning Publications.  To purchase an electronic or printed copy
of the book, visit http://www.manning.com/mcanally/


REQUIREMENT

The examples in this book are written to run on Ruby 1.8.6, and many will also
run no JRuby 1.1 or later.

If you need help installing Ruby, Appendix A provides installation and setup
instructions for Windows, OS X and Linux.  Appendix C deals specifically with
JRuby.

For most examples you will need to install specific Ruby gems before you can
run the code.  You will find an additional README file in each directory that
will instruct you which libraries to install, and provide all the other
relevant information you need to successfully run these examples.


ORGANIZATION

To help you find the relevant code for each section, we organized the source
code by chapter and section.  For example, while reading chapter 2 section 2
(Test-driven development with Ruby), you can check out the examples from the
directory CH2/2.2.

The examples are based on listings appearing in the book.  In many cases we
chose descriptive files names, for example, CH2/2.2/payroll_reporter.rb.  When it
didn't make sense, we just uses the listing number for the file name.

In several places we provide additional files necessary to make full use of the
example.  These include additional source files that do not show in the book,
sample data, etc.


CONTACT INFORMATION

Manning provides an Author Online forum accessible from:
  http://www.manning.com/mcanally/


LICENSE

This source code is provided for you to do whatever you like.  Ideally, have
fun and learn how to make the best of Ruby.