This book is a big reason that I'm a professional dev today. I'd done some QBasic as a kid and then VB in high school, but C++ really turned me off to programming in college. Fast forward a few years and some of the devs that I worked with were really excited about replacing all their PHP apps with something called Ruby on Rails, and they told me about this one weird book...

Kinda same story. I loved programming but PHP felt so hindering. People recommending Java or C++ to me appeared to don't get the fun part. Then Ruby and this book came along and here I am still loving and doing ruby nearly every day.

It's also the only coding book I ever enjoyed reading. Except Linda luikas kids books maybe :)

While I was already programming (C, C++ and Java), _why was a big reason for my decision to pick up ruby. I spent quite a few years after with it as my primary language, even now it's my go-to for any side-project and script.