I'm always tempted by pocket references, and nearly always disappointed. The Ruby Pocket Reference is no exception.
It is not clear who the target audience is. Beginning ruby programmers would not find enough tutorial information here to get started. Experienced ruby programmers will not find anything here that isn't more easily (and in some cases, more accurately) found in ri or rdoc documentation.
To make matters worse, I found a number of errors. For instance, in sec. 1.16.1.1 the examples given of the 'not' operator (!) are incorrect - the examples repeatedly are of the form
!x == y
where what was intended was !(x == y). Sec. 1.16.5 claims that the ruby case statement uses the semantics of == to evaluate the 'when' expressions, then goes on to show examples that illustrate that it is actually the === operator that is used.
Other parts of the book are simply not helpful. For example, sec. 1.16.6 talks about the "for var in container" construct, but the examples only show this being applied to Ranges, and the text never mentions that the construct will work on any implementer of Enumerable.
In all, I cannot recommend this book to anyone. If you need a portable ruby reference, then get the PDF of the Pickaxe book and carry it on your stick. If you need a good beginner's tutorial, there are plenty of them online (check out Why the Lucky Stiff, for example).
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