You could probably fill in any gaps in knowledge you have due to being a real programmer and not an academic by reading The Ruby Programming Language by the creator of Ruby, Yukihiro Matsumoto. It covers a lot of obscure details, such as the vagaries of multiple assignment in different kinds of lambdas, and is relatively new, covering new semantics in Ruby 1.9.
A boss of mine once told me that a long-term programmer that he knew and trusted once turned to him and asked, "I forget... how many bits are in a byte?" The moral of the story wasn't that this guy was an idiot--it was that it's sometimes possible to write a fair bit of competent code over a long term and miss out on things that seem to others as though they should be elementary.
