Ruby: How to bring back the joy of programming

Ruby is a nice scripting language similar to Perl but cleaner and fully object-orientated.

Find here a pointer to the main site about Ruby. Ruby Central also has a lots of data about Ruby.

You can find here a link to an online copy of the book « Programming Ruby », by Andrew Hunt & Dave Thomas.

Current development version is 1.9.2-p180. Current stable version is 1.8.7-p334, 1.8.6 is really on its way out now. Note I would recommend not using 1.8.7 at this point. It is unfortunately incorporating 1.9 features and constructs and using it could make some of your scripts incompatible. Rails 2.3.x is 1.8.7-compatible and Rails 3.0.x is 1.9-compatible. I’d urge you to switch to 1.9.2 instead and get your favorite gems’ authors to make them 1.9 compatible. The IsItruby1.9 site lists successfully (and unsuccessfully) installed gems in 1.9.

Alongside with Ruby, I’ve discovered the joys of a very neat and nicely designed web application framework called Ruby on Rails. I hope to write with it some of the applications I always wanted to have for a long time. There are quite a number of similar framework now like Nitro, Sinatra, Padrino (based on Sinatra) and others.

Some of my Ruby code here, oldish ciphers implemented in Ruby following the Test-Driven Development principle. I am also trying to write code using the Behaviour Driven-Development principle like News::Article.

A few years ago, a non-profit association (Association loi de 1901 in French) was established in France to help further spread Ruby usage and love. The website is there. If you are a French Ruby fan, please come and see us, there are semi-regular scheduled meetings like Apéro Ruby and Ruby/RailsCamp.

Some pictures taken at Solutions Linux 2009 here on Flickr!