Beginning Programming All-in-One For Dummies, 2nd Edition

Chapter 5

Ruby

IN THIS CHAPTER

Understanding the structure of a Ruby program

Creating comments and declaring variables

Using operators

Working with branching statements and looping statements

Creating functions

Working with data structures

Making objects

The Ruby programming language was created by Yukihiro “Matz” Matsumoto, a Japanese programmer who named the language after a gemstone in reference to the Perl (pearl) programming language. Although most languages focus on wringing out extra performance from computer hardware, Ruby focuses on a clean language syntax that’s easy for programmers to understand and use. Instead of trying to increase machine efficiency, Ruby tries to increase programmer efficiency. The overriding principle of Ruby is to create a language of least surprise, ...