First impressions: Ruby

People have been talking a lot about Ruby... and I haven't actually heard anything bad about it this far. And I like good things :), so I decided to try it out.

To start with many recommended this site: http://tryruby.hobix.com. And it's great except I never got past the File.copy section, seemed a bit buggy.

I'm quite used to C and C++ so I found To Ruby From C and C++ interesting. After reading that I went on to go trough the official Quickstart.

The best learning resource I've found this far would be Learning Ruby.

The .chm of "Programming Ruby" included in the Ruby documentation isn't bad either.

The way of installing a Ruby environment is generally said to be the One-Click Ruby Installer. It's a pack containing ruby, libraries, docs and the gem packet manager (and more). Never did get the included FreeRIDE to work (no output). SciTE and the Ruby In Steel plugin to VS2005 worked about equally as good (colors, no auto-completion).

As I'm on my way to becoming a .NET programmer I'm of course interested in the Ruby.NET project, and I've tried their beta version with some small programs. I'm a bit interested in using it for scripting, but I'll probably end up with Boo for that (as that language is written for .NET to begin with).

One of the best uses I've found this far for Ruby is with ruby-on-rails and I'm definitely going to try making a site with ruby-on-rails someday.

So.. what are my first impressions of Ruby?

I'd say it's about the same as I had with Perl or Python: it's fast and easy to write small applications but I miss the robust feeling of C++ or C#. However, you should certainly use the right tools for the job at hand so you'll never know when it might be usefull :).