Back to Basics: What is Ruby Anyway?

It's all fine and good to give you an overview of how to create regular expressions, use RubyGems or play with some interesting scripts, but the bottom line is if you don't know the basics of what makes Ruby Ruby, then none of the rest is of any use.

So what is Ruby anyway? Well, according to Yukihiro "Matz" Matsumoto, Ruby's creator, it's a fun programming language. We've all heard the buzz word "user-friendly," but Ruby goes beyond user-friendly. It's a language that is human-oriented instead machine-oriented. It's pure object-orientation is designed to reduce confusion instead of making you paw through lines of code to find the "gem" inside.

So if you haven't taken the time to really get to know your programming language, what it can do (and what it can't), and how it can be used, today might be the day to discover all about Ruby.