On August 19, 2009 Why the Lucky Stiff removed every trace of his work from the Web, including this book: the Poignant Guide to Ruby.

I've salvaged the book from the Internet archive and re-published it. The original work was under the Attribution-ShareAlike license.

Since then I have:

1. Changed code examples to never generate syntax warnings
2. Updated code examples to match Ruby 1.9 behavior
3. Applied grammar/spelling corrections
4. Updated outdated Ruby installation instructions
5. Converted the HTML book into Markdown (_why originally authored it in Textile)
6. Made a build system powered by Jekyll
7. Enabled syntax highlighted code where previously there wasn't

Run jekyll serve to build the site with Jekyll.

The individual chapters are in _posts/ directory.

There's a Japanese translation of the book, although I can't tell how up to date it is.

Chapter 8: Heaven's Harp was never recovered. I suspect _why started drawing it, but never finished or published.

"Quite so," he said. "I went out to my car yesterday and there was a shoe in the passenger's seat. A very battered oxford. Looking straight ahead like it needed a lift to the cobbler's. I did a cavity search and came up with a crisp note from my deceased ancestor, the same whose property I've looked after, lo, these many years."

"Wow," I said. And I glared at my shoe, at the things it would do when I'm gone.