Ruby is a fun toy. It’s also a serious programming language. Ruby is the jolly uncle who
keeps the kids entertained, but who puts in solid 12-hour days at the construction site
during the week. To hundreds of thousands of programmers, Ruby has become a good
friend, a trusted servant, and has revealed a new way of thinking about programming
and software development.
Like the guitar, it’s often claimed that Ruby is an easy language to learn and a hard
one to master. I’d agree, with some provisions. If you don’t know any programming
languages already, Ruby will be surprisingly easy to learn. If you already know some languages
such as PHP, Perl, BASIC, C, or Pascal, some of the concepts in Ruby will already
be familiar to you, but the different perspective Ruby takes with problem solving will
probably throw you at first. Like the differences between spoken languages, Ruby differs
from most other programming languages not only by syntax, but by culture, grammar,
and customs. In fact, Ruby has more in common with more esoteric languages such as
LISP and Smalltalk than with better-known languages such as PHP and C++.