Day 1: Finding a Nanny
All magic aside, Mary Poppins is first and foremost a great nanny. When you first learn a language, your job is to learn how to use it to do the jobs you already know how to do. Treat this first conversation with Ruby as a dialogue. Does the conversation flow freely, or is it unnecessarily awkward? What’s the core programming model? How does it treat types? Let’s start digging for some answers.
Lightning Tour
As promised, I’m not going to take you through an exhaustive outdated installation process, but installing Ruby is a snap. Just go to http://www.ruby-lang.org/en/downloads/, find your platform, and install Ruby 1.8.6 or newer. I am running Ruby version 1.8.7 for this chapter, and version 1.9 will have some slight differences. ...
Get Seven Languages in Seven Weeks now with the O’Reilly learning platform.
O’Reilly members experience books, live events, courses curated by job role, and more from O’Reilly and nearly 200 top publishers.
