7. Tools and Libraries
An installation of Ruby gives you more than just an interpreter to execute your source files with. It also includes an interactive tool for experimenting with Ruby (IRB), a utility for reading documentation (RI), and one for generating documentation (RDoc). Mastering these tools is an important step for Ruby programmers. But there’s another equally important tool that ships with Ruby—the gem utility.
There’s an amazingly large number of libraries and applications packaged as RubyGems just waiting to be installed with gem. In fact, it’s quite common for Ruby applications to depend on many third-party gems. Managing all of those dependencies can be troublesome if you’re not using a tool to help you.
In this chapter, I’ll ...
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