Introduction - Ruby!

Ruby is a dynamic, open source, server-side scripting, interpreted, reflective, object-oriented, general purpose programming language. It was designed by Yukihiro Matsumato in Japan in the mid-1990s.

Features of Ruby

• Ruby was influenced by Perl, Smalltalk, Eiffel, Ada, and Lisp.
• Ruby has an automatic memory management and dynamic type system.
• Ruby can run on multiple platforms such as the various versions of Windows, MAC OS and UNIX.
• Ruby is free of charge but requires a liscence.
• Ruby can be used to write Common Gateway Interface (CGI) scripts.
• Ruby can be embedded into HTML.
• Ruby written applications can be easily maintainable and scalable.
• Ruby can be used for the development of Internet and Intranet applications.
• Ruby supports many GUI tools such as Tcl/Tk, GTK, OpenGL.
• Ruby can easily connect to DB2, MySQL, Oracle, Sybase.

Compile Ruby program

Create a file hello_world.rb and write below code in it

  #! /usr/bin/ruby
  puts "Hello World !!";

To run above code first go to the directory where hello_world.rb exists, then run the command

ruby hello_world.rb
# output is
Hello World !!

In irb interactive command line mode you can run and test following code:

>> puts "Hello, world !!"
Hello, world !!
=> nil