Flanagan David - The Ruby Programming Language

Before anything else, I must thank Matz for the beautiful language he has designed, for his help understanding that language, and for the Nutshell that this book grew out of.

Thanks also to:

Finally, of course, my love and thanks to my family.

David Flanagan

http://www.davidflanagan.com

January 2008

In addition to the people listed by David (except myself), I appreciate the help from community members all around the world, especially from Japan: Koichi Sasada, Nobuyoshi Nakada, Akira Tanaka, Shugo Maeda, Usaku Nakamura, and Shyouhei Urabe to name a few (not in any particular order).

And finally, I thank my family, who hopefully forgive their husband and father for dedicating time to Ruby development.

Yukihiro Matsumoto

January 2008

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Chapter 1. Introduction

Ruby is a dynamic programming language with a complex but expressive grammar and a core class library with a rich and powerful API. Ruby draws inspiration from Lisp, Smalltalk, and Perl, but uses a grammar that is easy for C and Java programmers to learn. Ruby is a pure object-oriented language, but it is also suitable for procedural and functional programming styles. It includes powerful metaprogramming capabilities and can be used to create domain-specific languages or DSLs.