Take the pure object orientation of Smalltalk, but remove the quirky syntax and reliance on a workspace. Add in the convenience and power of Perl, but without all the special cases and magic conversions. Wrap it up in a clean syntax based in part on Eiffel, add a few concepts from Scheme, CLU, Sather, and Common Lisp. You end up with Ruby. In English and German.
Book is available as downloadable HTML and XML files.
In depth review and analysis. Don't reinvent the wheel. Makes Ruby parser class from a Bison-like specification file. The last two combine text examples with the online interpreter to run them. Information on Ruby, powered by his XML module.