[skywhopper]

Seems a little suspect to blame this book, when there were plenty of other excellent resources for learning Ruby at the time, and this one was obviously a little offbeat. For what it's worth I had the same experience with this book, but instead of blaming an artist whose book inspired thousands of Ruby programmers because it didn't inspire me, I moved on and got the Pragmatic Programmer's Ruby book instead, and I've had nearly 15 years of joyous Ruby programming in my career since. I'd say the main cause of you not learning Ruby was not this book, but your own behavior.