Ruby Best Practices is a book by Gregory Brown (and published by O'Reilly) that looks into the "Ruby way" of doing things in the Ruby language and, specifically, why Rubyists tend to write Ruby the way they do. It's an engaging book and we took a look at it and interviewed Gregory Brown about it just over a year ago.

Gregory always wanted to be able to give away his book with a Creative Commons license eventually and O'Reilly have kindly allowed him to start doing that, a chapter at a time. So far, the first five chapters are available to download at GitHub (in PDF format). Specifically:

• Chapter 1 - Driving Code Through Tests
• Chapter 2 - Designing Beautiful APIs
• Chapter 3 - Mastering the Dynamic Toolkit
• Chapter 4 - Text Processing and File Management
• Chapter 5 - Functional Programming Techniques

However, it's not just a free for all! If you read these chapters, Gregory (the primary author of the book) implores you to comment and offer any advice or insights you might have on the relevant posts on the RBP blog.. he also suggests that if you really like it, you should buy a copy of the book somehow, if only to convince O'Reilly that this publishing model is a "Good Thing." Gregory claims that the book hasn't even made its advance back yet (how!?), which makes this gesture all the better.

To buy a copy, head over to O'Reilly for e-book and print copies or go to your usual bookselling site (Amazon.com are probably the cheapest as usual).

Kudos to Gregory and O'Reilly for this move.