In case you'd be interested in a second opinion: I made it through twenty-one exercises of Learn Ruby the Hard Way a couple months ago, got bored, and have retained almost none of it. I'm probably not the target audience, but that doesn't bother me so much; on the other hand, if I'm not retaining stuff after faithfully going through Hard Way's copybook approach to language acquisition, that doesn't speak well for its efficacy among people who are. Unless for some reason programming experience makes me less likely to retain new languages? But that's (a) counterintuitive, and (b) contrary to data I've seen for natural languages, at least.

In any case, I don't think I'll be returning to the series.