The Well-Grounded Rubyist, Second Edition

Chapter 1. Bootstrapping your Ruby literacy

This chapter covers

• A Ruby syntax survival kit
• A basic Ruby programming how-to: writing, saving, running, and error-checking programs
• A tour of the Ruby installation
• The mechanics of Ruby extensions
• Ruby’s out-of-the-box command-line tools, including the interactive Ruby interpreter (irb)

This book will give you a foundation in Ruby, and this chapter will give your foundation a foundation. The goal of the chapter is to bootstrap you into the study of Ruby with enough knowledge and skill to proceed comfortably into what lies beyond.

We’ll look at basic Ruby syntax and techniques and at how Ruby works: what you do when you write a program, how you get Ruby to run your program, and how you split a program ...