Mission Data Blog » Presentation: You’ll Be Seeing Ruby

Presentation: You’ll Be Seeing Ruby

Be sure to read the blog post about our first showing.

You’ll Be Seeing Ruby: An Introduction to the Ruby Programming Language is presented by Mission Data developers Darren Day and Chuck Fouts.

Watch this space for material from the presentation including sample programs.

You’ll Be Seeing Ruby Presentation Slides
Download presentation: seeing_ruby_20060517.zip
Seeing Ruby Handout PDF

Presentation Outline

What is Ruby?
- Installing Ruby
- Ruby’s Toolset
- Editors and IDEs
- Documentation
Language Fundamentals
- Strings
- Numbers
- Objects
- Variables
- Dynamic Typing and Duck Typing
- Methods
- Classes
- Mixins
More Objects and Blocks
- Regular Expressions
- Arrays
- Hashes
- Don’t Repeat Yourself: Use Blocks
  - Iterations and Transactions
  - Blocks from Both Sides
Demos

Seeing Ruby: Additional Resources

Getting Ruby

Try Ruby with Nothing to Install (and no money down)

tryruby.hobix.com

Try the Ruby language with nothing more than 10 minutes and a modern web browser. The tutorial mode is great.

*nix

Linux distros will include a release in the package manager. Mac OS X ships with a Ruby build (although
many people prefer to build with source). FreeBSD includes Ruby in Ports. Cygwin
includes a build, but the Ruby Installer for Windows may be a better choice.

One-click Ruby Installer for Microsoft Windows

http://rubyinstaller.rubyforge.org

No external dependancies. You’ll get the base distribution and a few extras including
the SciTE text editor and the RubyGems package tool.

Ruby Source Distribution

http://ruby-lang.org

Grab the source and compile on Linux, BSD, Mac OS X, and several other platforms.

Documentation

Programming Ruby: The Pragmatic Programmer’s Guide

2nd Edition, October 2004

Dave Thomas, with Chad Fowler and Andy Hunt

ISBN: 0-9745140-5-5

http://pragmaticprogrammer.com/titles/ruby/

Available both in dead tree and PDF format, the Pickaxe Book has become the de facto Ruby introduction
and reference. Free copies of the first edition
can be found on the web.

Ruby-doc.org: Documenting the Ruby Language

http://ruby-doc.org

This site includes the standard API references, bibliographies, and lots of downloadable content including
first edition of the Pickaxe.

Ruby QuickRef

http://www.zenspider.com/Languages/Ruby/QuickRef.html

Concentrates on the Ruby language syntax rather than the objects.

Ruby Cheatsheet

http://www.cenophobie.com/ruby/rubycheat.php

A nice printable quick reference in png and PDF formats.

why’s (Poignant) Guide to Ruby

http://poignantguide.net/ruby/

Irreverent, silly, yet informative book-in-progress that teaches you Ruby with the help of cartoon foxes.

Libraries and Projects

Ruby Application Archive

http://raa.ruby-lang.org

A categorized directory of Ruby projects. Think Fresh Meat for Ruby.

Rubyforge

http://rubyforge.org

Hosting for open-source Ruby projects. Think Sourceforge for Ruby.

RubyGems

http://docs.rubygems.org

Package management for Ruby libraries and applications. Rubyforge is the default source for gems, but anyone
can package up their code as a gem and even run their own gemservers. Think CPAN for…say it with me…

Ruby on Rails

http://www.rubyonrails.org

The open source web framework that many people are hearing about before Ruby. A very well organized effort with great documentation
and an impressive kit for rapidly developing, testing, and deploying websites that integrate with databases.

Community

ruby-talk

http://www.ruby-lang.org/en/20020104.html

The ruby-talk mailing list is a very active
forum for Rubyists, including creator Yukihiro “Matz” Matsumoto. The archives are an excellent resource.
The Ruby Weekly News (http://rubyweeklynews.org) summarizes the previous
week’s post.
The mailing list is mirrored on both the Usenet (comp.lang.ruby)
and on the web (http://www.ruby-forum.com).

RedHanded: Sneaking Ruby Through the System