On my top-list of things to check during the summer, I had written “Ruby on rails”. Maybe you wonder “Why would a C# guy want to learn Ruby?”. The reason is simple: a lot of websites are using Ruby, and it’s quite popular in the open-source community. And what I discovered was really great!

What is Ruby?

Ruby is a scripting and oriented-object language, inspired by Perl, Lisp, Smalltalk, and created in 1995 by a Japanese programmer, M. Yukihiro Matsumoto. It’s often used with Ruby on Rails, an awesome web framework, very popular on Github (which is built with).

What makes Ruby different from Java, C# or Python? In my opinion, Ruby is human-friendly. What I mean here is if you ask a friend to take a look at your code, if he’s not comfortable with programming, it would be like read Klingon for him. But with Ruby, it’s absolutely clear to read and understand. It’s also very easy to learn, and you still have powerful features for advanced programmers.

Here is an example:

5.times { print "Odelay!" }

So this code displays the message “Odelay” 5 times. Easy, right? And the whole Ruby syntax is the same way: easy to read and logical.

And Ruby on Rails is also very easy to use (if you success to install it at least). You can get packages for a lot of stuff, like JQuery, Json system or Coffeescript compiler, with a system called gem. It works like Aptitude on Linux. You just specify what you want, and it’s automatically retrieved from the Web.

Some resources to start

If you want to introduce yourself into Ruby, here are some resources I find really useful to learn it!

First of all, I really recommend you a wonderful book called Why’s (poignant) guide to Ruby. You can download it as PDF for free. It’s really amazing, and full of tips about Ruby. It’s also funny thanks to the many comic strips you have within. It became one of my favourite technical books. Here is the link:

http://mislav.uniqpath.com/poignant-guide/

If you prefer a more interactive way to learn Ruby, you can also visit this website:

http://tryruby.org/levels/1/challenges/0

It’s an easy and very convenient way to learn the basics.

If you want to know more about Ruby on Rails, I recommend you the first Get Started of the official website. It’s a little bit long, but it covers the majority of the main features:

http://guides.rubyonrails.org/getting_started.html

I hope that by reading this short article you want to know more about Ruby. It really worth it!