Learning Chef

Chapter 3. Ruby and Chef Syntax

As briefly discussed in Chapter 2, both the Chef Development Kit and Chef Client are written and implemented in Ruby. However, prior experience with Ruby is not a requirement for writing Chef code. Most people who use Chef have no prior experience with the Ruby programming language. So let’s spend some time going over the basics of Ruby and how it relates to Chef syntax.

Overview of Ruby

Ruby is an object-oriented programming language that was originally designed in 1993 as a replacement for Perl. Yukihiro Matsumoto (or “Matz” for short) designed and created Ruby in Japan. Ruby became very popular in the United States after two things occurred: 1) Dave Thomas wrote the book “Programming Ruby” in English in 2000, as until then most of the documentation on Ruby was in Japanese, and 2) David Heinemeier Hansson created the Ruby on Rails framework in 2003, which came to be viewed as an incredibly productive way to build web applications. The rapid adoption of Ruby on Rails, along with great documentation written in English, led people outside Japan to appreciate the Ruby language for other purposes besides web development. As illustrated in the next section, Ruby boasts a very English-like syntax.

Although Ruby is object oriented, it also supports functional and imperative programming paradigms. Unlike C or Java, which implement static typing, Ruby is a dynamically typed language. In this way, Ruby is similar to Python and Lisp. Ruby is designed for programmer ...