Some Ruby Facts
Ruby has an extremely simple syntax, inspired by Ada, Perl with Small-talk like oriented features.
Ruby has exception handling features, like Java, to make it easy to handle errors.
Ruby is a complete, full, pure object oriented language, this means all data in Ruby is an object.
Ruby features blocks in its syntax (code surrounded by '{' ... '}' or 'do' ... 'end'). These blocks can be passed to methods, or converted into closures.
Ruby features a true mark-and-sweep garbage collector. It works with all Ruby objects. You don't have to care about maintaining reference counts in extension libraries.
Ruby is highly portable: it is developed mostly on Linux, but works on many types of UNIX, DOS, Windows 95/98/Me/NT/2000/XP, MacOS, BeOS, OS/2, etc.
Ruby originated in Japan in the early 1990's and has started to become popular worldwide in the past few years as more English language books and documentation have become available.
Until September of 200 documentation was incomplete and only available in Japanese
Ruby is best used for Text Processing, CGI programming, Network programming, XML programming, GUI applications, AI and Exploratory Math, General Programming, Prototyping, Extreme Programming. Ruby is NOT made for High Taffic web applications, Operating systems implementation, Compiler implementation.
The Ruby is the birthstone of July, The Pearl is the birthstone of June, the name ruby is supposed to symbolize progression.
Where to get Ruby