Ruby is an absolutely pure object-oriented scripting language written in
C and designed with Perl and Python capabilities in mind. While its
roots are in Japan, Ruby is slowly but surely gaining ground in the US.
The goal of Yukihiro Matsumoto, creator of Ruby and author of this book,
is to incorporate the strengths of languages like Perl, Python, Lisp and
Smalltalk. Ruby is a genuine attempt to combine the best of everything
in the scripting world. Since 1993, Ruby mailing lists have been
established, Web pages have formed, and a community has grown around it.
The language itself is very good at text processing and is notable for
its broad object orientation. Ruby is portable and runs under GNU/Linux
(and other Unices) as well as DOS, MS Windows and Mac.With Ruby in a
Nutshell, Matsumoto offers a practical reference to the features of
this new language including the command-line options, syntax, built-in
variables, functions, and many commonly used classes and modules. This
guide covers the current stable version of Ruby (1.6), yet is applicable
to the development version 1.7 and the next planned stable version 1.8.
You will find a thorough description of Ruby's language syntax, and a
description of the core functionality built into the standard Ruby
interpreter, which has more than 800 built-in methods in 42 classes and
modules.Ruby finds its power through its built-in libraries, and this
handy volume take you through the many useful libraries that come with
the standard Ruby distribution--from network access via HTTP and CGI
programming, to data persistence using the DBM library. This book
concludes with coverage of the unique tools that come with Ruby,
including the debugger, profiler, and irb (or interactive ruby.)Find out
how Ruby combines the strengths of other languages, and why it has
captured the interest of so many open source programmers. As part of the
successful "in a nutshell" series of books from O'Reilly & Associates,
Ruby in a Nutshell is for readers who want a single desktop reference
for all their needs.
