Ruby In A Nutshell

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 U.S. The goal of Yukihiro Matsumoto, creator of Ruby and author of this book, is to incorporate the strengths of other languages like Perl, Python, Lisp, and Smalltalk. Ruby in a Nutshell is a practical reference guide to the features of Ruby, including the command line options, syntax, built- in variables, functions, and many commonly used classes and modules. The book 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. The Ruby language syntax is thoroughly discussed, along with the core functionality built into the standard Ruby interpreter, the built-in library, and the tools that come with Ruby, including the debugger, profiler, and irb (or interactive ruby.)