Sams Teach Yourself Ruby in 21 Days

First Steps

In deference to a tradition started with the classic book that taught so many people how to program in C, The C Programming Language by Brian Kernighan and Dennis Ritchie, let's crank out the obligatory “Hello, world!” program. Try typing this directly into a terminal window:

% ruby
						-e 'puts "Hello World!"'
Hello World!

Life in the Command Line

Was that really a program? Well, yes. A program that does something simple, such as print a message, needs no elaborate structure. In fact, the program proper lives within the single quotes, and is this:

							puts "Hello World!"
						

As you might guess, puts means to put a string of characters someplace, in this case the screen.

The code that surrounds the program is our way of starting the Ruby ...