From Developer Community
Ruby
If you are in need of a very fast, compact, object-oriented scripting language then look no further than
Ruby. To quote the What's Ruby page from the Ruby website, "It is simple, straight-forward, extensible, and portable." To become so affective Ruby draws from many other programming languages like Java, Python, Eiffel and Smalltalk to name a few and takes features from each that make them appealing to developers.
Highlights of Ruby's Features
These are just a few of the more important features of Ruby for a developer:
- Ruby is truly and completely object-oriented. Every thing in Ruby is an object.
- Ruby's "mark-and-sweep garbage collector" does collection on all Ruby object, you are free to forget about GC completely!
- Exception handling is an integrated part of the Ruby language.
- An API interface is available to allow extension of Ruby using C.
- Ruby includes inheritance, a cornerstone of OO languages
- While developed on Linux, Ruby is portable across many platforms, including many Unix's, most versions of Windows, Mac OS, OS2 and even DOS.
These are just a few of the features of Ruby. To see a more complete list check out What's Ruby. Another really good place to get an immediate lowdown on Ruby is Hal Fulton's Thirty-seven Reasons I Love Ruby.
Okay, now you know you want to use Ruby, what's next?
There are a number of excellent resources for learning the in's and out's of Ruby programming. I'll list a few that I ran across and looked at.
- Programming Ruby: The Pragmatic Programmer's Guide (First Edition). This is a complete on-line book by Dave Thomas that will take you through Ruby from start to finish. From here you can also link to the author's site where you can purchase the second edition.
- Learn to Program by Chris Pine. This is a good tutorial on Ruby that really assumes no prior programming knowledge. Great if you know someone who wishes to learn to program using a solid OO language like Ruby.
- Try why's (poignant) guide to Ruby for an unusual and entertaining (guess that depends on your sense of humor) trip through learning Ruby. Be prepared for something a bit different, yet still very informative.
- Ruby on Rails is perhaps one of the most exciting projects you'll find using Ruby. It is "...is a full-stack, open-source web framework in Ruby for writing real-world applications with joy and less code than most frameworks spend doing XML sit-ups." Check it out, that's all I can say!
