Ubuntu Unleashed 2013 Edition: Covering 12.10 and 13.04, Eighth Edition

Ruby

In Ruby, everything is an object. Every object can be given its own properties and methods. You can use closures (called blocks in Ruby). You do not need to declare variables, and only single inheritance exists. Ruby includes garbage collection, exception handling, and can be extended by writing extensions in C. Ruby was heavily influenced in different ways by Lisp, Perl, Python, and Smalltalk and was originally designed for systems administration-type scripting.

Most Ruby programmers seem to prefer using Ruby in combination with a web application framework called Rails, making what is known as Ruby on Rails. This framework is strongly tied to the DRY philosophy: “Don’t repeat yourself.” Every piece of information is stored in a single, ...