Ruby Tutorial

What is Ruby?

Ruby is an open-source and high-level programming language, which is known for its simplicity and developer-friendliness. This is designed by Yukihiro Matsumoto with the purpose of making programming more enjoyable and productive for developers. Ruby includes a lot of key features like its Object-Oriented, Dynamic Typing, Readable Syntax, and a large Standard Library collection.

Why to Learn Ruby?

Ruby is a simple and expressive programming language, which provides various advantages to programmers, especially in fields like web development, automation tasks, scripting, etc. Here in the following, we will discuss its features and advantages.

• Simplicity and Readable Syntax: Ruby's syntax is designed in a very clean and concise way, which provides easy-to-read, write, and understand code leading to increased productivity by allowing developers to focus more on problem-solving rather than complex syntax.
• Powerful Frameworks: Ruby also provides popular web development frameworks like Ruby on Rails (RoR), which is a popular framework used for web development allowing developers to build complex applications more efficiently.
• Strong Community and Ecosystem: Ruby also provides a supportive and active community, where users will find many libraries, tools, and resources. RubyGems repository offers a large set of collections of reusable code and libraries to accelerate development.
• Prototyping: This is great for prototyping ideas and applications as its dynamic nature allows rapid iterations. This makes Ruby ideal for startups and developers.

Characteristics of Ruby

The following are important characteristics of Ruby programming:

• Object-oriented:
  Ruby is purely object-oriented, which means everything in Ruby is an object including primitive data types like numbers, strings, and nil.
• Dynamic Typing and Concise Syntax:
  In ruby, you don't need to explicitly declare any variable types, it is automatically determined at runtime, providing greater flexibility and its syntax is to be designed clean, simple, and human-readable.
• Automatic Memory Management (Garbage Collection):
  Ruby also provides flexibility by automatically managing memory allocation and deallocation with garbage collection, helping reduce complexity and the risk of memory leaks.
• Large Standard Library:
  Ruby also has a large standard library consisting of many built-in classes and methods, covering a wide range of tasks like file I/O and data manipulation, etc.
• Metaprogramming:
  It also allows to modify objects and classes during runtime. This provides flexibility as programs can dynamically be altered thus supporting Metaprogramming.

Ruby Hello, World! Program

To start with any programming, the very basic program is to print "Hello World!" Here we will print it in Ruby by using the puts. Below is an example of code to print "Hello, World!". You can try it using the Edit & Run button.

# Ruby code to print Hello, World!
puts "Hello, World!"

Ruby Online Compiler

We provide an easy, user-friendly, and fast Ruby online compiler, where you can write, save, run, and share your Ruby programs. Click on this link to open it: Ruby Online Compiler

Applications of Ruby

Ruby is a general-purpose programming language, which has a wide range of applications that have been discussed in the given following.

• Web and API Development:
  Ruby on Rails is one of the most popular frameworks for web development, where Rails is a full-stack web framework, which is used for building dynamic and database-driven websites. Example GitHub, Shopify, Airbnb, etc. Similarly, it is also commonly used for building RESTful APIs and web services. example Stripe and Twilio.
• Scripting and Automation:
  Ruby's concise syntax and rich libraries make it the best choice for creating command-line tools, scripting, and automating repetitive tasks like file manipulation, data processing, System administration and testing, etc.
• Data Extraction and Analysis:
  Ruby's powerful libraries like RMagick for image processing, Nokogiri for parsing HTML and XML, and HTTParty for making HTTP requests help in web scraping, data extraction, and analysis.
• DevOps and System Administration:
  Ruby is also used in DevOps and system administration tasks, with tools like Chef (a configuration management tool) and Puppet, which are built using Ruby.
• Application Development:
  Unlike C++ or Python, ruby can also used for developing various applications like game development, E-commerce Development, Social Media Platforms, etc.

Jobs or Careers with Ruby

Ruby's nature of rapid development cycle, ease of use, and ability to handle interactions make it a great choice for site and application development, although it's not used for large-scale platforms. Here in the following, we will discuss a few of its career options.

• Ruby on Rails and Ruby Developer
• Software Engineer
• DevOps Engineer
• Full-Stack Developer
• Data Analyst/Scientist
• Product and Community Manager
• API Developer
• Game Developer

Target Audience: Who should Learn Ruby?

This tutorial covers all key information from basic to advanced concepts related to Ruby scripting languages, which is useful for both aspiring and experienced programmers, web developers especially those who work with Ruby on Rails, Full-Stack Developers, also for Startups and Entrepreneurs as it allows for rapid development of web applications, Developers who interested in prototyping, test and driven developers and DevOps developers etc.

Prerequisites to Learn Ruby

Before you start practicing with various types of examples given in this tutorial, we are making an assumption that you are already aware of computer programs like basic computer literacy, basic knowledge of text editors and IDEs (like VS Code and Sublime Text, etc.), familiarity with version control system like git.