May 2007
Beginner
255 pages
6h 44m
English
Content preview from Learning RubyBecome an O’Reilly member and get unlimited access to this title plus top books and audiobooks from O’Reilly and nearly 200 top publishers, thousands of courses curated by job role, 150+ live events each month,
O’Reilly covers everything we've got, with content to help us build a world-class technology community, upgrade the capabilities and competencies of our teams, and improve overall team performance as well as their engagement.I wanted to learn C and C++, but it didn't click for me until I picked up an O'Reilly book. When I went on the O’Reilly platform, I was astonished to find all the books there, plus live events and sandboxes so you could play around with the technology.I’ve been on the O’Reilly platform for more than eight years. I use a couple of learning platforms, but I'm on O'Reilly more than anybody else. When you're there, you start learning. I'm never disappointed.I'm always learning. So when I got on to O'Reilly, I was like a kid in a candy store. There are playlists. There are answers. There's on-demand training. It's worth its weight in gold, in terms of what it allows me to do.
Chapter 1. Ruby Basics
Perhaps like you, I’ve learned to program in a number of languages over the years—BASIC, FORTRAN, C, C++, C#, Java, and JavaScript among others—but so far Ruby is my favorite. It has been the most fun to learn and use. Why? Because of its syntax. If you have a background in a variety of other languages, Ruby is easy to figure out. And it’s flexible: Ruby lets you do things in a variety of ways, not just one way, so you can decide how to do things your way.
Ruby is an interpreted rather than a compiled language. You can call it a scripting language, an object-oriented language, a refreshing language. It’s not a perfect language. It doesn’t have to be. It’s still my favorite. It has that certain je ne sais quoi. If it didn’t, why would I spend hundreds of hours writing a book about it? Certainly not for money and fame.
To me, one of the best aspects of Ruby is its composability. Composability is the degree to which you can express logic by combining and recombining parts of a language (see James Clark’s “The Design of RELAX NG” at http://www.thaiopensource.com/relaxng/design.html#section:5). Ruby’s got that, big time.
Also, Ruby isn’t under committee or corporate control. It’s open source. It was written by Matz, with some help from his friends. (It was written in C, by the way, and can take C extensions.)
“Matz” is short for Yukihiro Matsumoto (from Japan). He started working on Ruby in 1993, and first released it to the world in 1995, the same year Java came out. ...
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O’Reilly covers everything we've got, with content to help us build a world-class technology community, upgrade the capabilities and competencies of our teams, and improve overall team performance as well as their engagement.Julian F.
I wanted to learn C and C++, but it didn't click for me until I picked up an O'Reilly book. When I went on the O’Reilly platform, I was astonished to find all the books there, plus live events and sandboxes so you could play around with the technology.Addison B.
I’ve been on the O’Reilly platform for more than eight years. I use a couple of learning platforms, but I'm on O'Reilly more than anybody else. When you're there, you start learning. I'm never disappointed.Amir M.
I'm always learning. So when I got on to O'Reilly, I was like a kid in a candy store. There are playlists. There are answers. There's on-demand training. It's worth its weight in gold, in terms of what it allows me to do.