Chapter 1. Bootstrapping your Ruby literacy

 

In this chapter

  • A Ruby syntax survival kit
  • Tour of the Ruby installation
  • Walk-throughs of sample Ruby programs
  • The mechanics of Ruby extensions
  • Ruby’s out-of-the-box command-line tools

 

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’re going to 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 into more than one file. You’ll learn several variations on the process of running ...

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