Ruby Hacking Guide Translation Project has been started by Vincent ISAMBART. The book written by Aoki-san, an author of many Ruby core libraries, Racc, setup.rb and so on, is one of the greatest Ruby books. It is dedicated to show Ruby implementation (i.e. C language, not Ruby language), stractures and how to read codes of big projects. He has uploaded his whole text to the web and now also gives a same permission for translated English versions. I really appreciate him.

I feel the book is (one of) a kind of source of the Japanese Rubyists’ power. For example you would completely understand the relationship of class, meta-class and singleton class. Now it is being opened to English. I am very sorry that the Japanese version has gone out of print and is very hard to get even with net auctions. Don’t get me wrong. It does not mean the book is bad. But it is for upper-level users.

He is a good writer as well. He is a university student of social science, not technology and natural science! His another book explains well a parser and scanner by using Racc. I heard he is writing a new one, a Haskell book…