Sams Teach Yourself Ruby in 21 Days

Motivation

Many complicated tasks are best handled by delegating parts here and there. An automobile manufacturing plant doesn't build a vehicle from scratch; it buys assemblies from other plants, builds others, and assembles them all into a car.

Similarly, a program file written in C is not directly changed into an executable program file in one step; a preprocessor, compiler, linker, assembler, and optimizer each handle a part of the process. Whenever responsibilities are split, somebody or something has to coordinate the work.

Most of us are system administrators to some extent: We keep our computers running, clean up after unexpected problems, install and uninstall applications, and so on. In the Windows world, some of these tasks are taken ...