Introduction To Ruby

Introduction

The Ruby scripting language was invented in the early 1990s by Yukihiro Matsumoto with the stable version Ruby 1.0 appearing on Christmas day of 1996.

Ruby is a general-purpose scripting language that was designed to be simpler, more natural and more fun to program with than the alternatives available at the time. It is a multi-paradigm language, supporting imperative, object-oriented and functional programming.

Getting Ruby

Ruby scripts can be written using any text editor. In order for them to run, Ruby needs to be installed on your computer. You can find installers for all major platforms on the Ruby Language web site, on this page.

This Guide

There is a lot you can do with Ruby. This guide focuses on the basics of the language. Working through the references, examples and challenges in order should provide a starting point for anyone wishing to add Ruby programming to their skillset. There's far more to Ruby than is covered in this guide - you will want to explore the Ruby documentation for some of these statements to find out more of the features of the language that have not been documented here.