Playing with Ruby

With the 1.0 release of IronRuby I decided to take a brief detour from my prior game plan of outside-in development . Part of that decision was because I'd wanted to check out Ruby for a while as a dynamic language (I've lived in a stuffy, static world for too long) with a lot of hype around it. Part of it was because most of the cutting edge BDD work is happening in the Ruby space. And the last part is that Ruby is in the .NET space now (at least up to 1.8.6) so the barrier for entry couldn't possibly get any lower. Yeah, I know the IronRuby project has been going on for years and prior to that it was dirt simple to get Ruby running on Windows but whatever. I'm here now.

Last year I did manage to pick up the book Beginning Ruby which I, unfortunately, didn't take a shine to. The first handful of chapters were light on the details of Ruby and deferred it for later chapters that I never got to. But that's also my fault because I'm a reference book kind of guy. I just picked up The Ruby Programming Language the other day which totally itches that scratch.

I've been playing around with the interactive Ruby shell which has been fun. It gives me a chance to take a spin before I do anything serious. Now I'm looking to pick up an IDE. I downloaded NetBeans and RubyMine. I'll post back with impressions on both the language and the tools.