Iowa Ruby Brigade

Organizational Meeting

September 20, 2007

Agenda

• Organizational Meeting (30 minutes)
• Getting Started with Ruby (60 minutes)
  • Installing Ruby
  • Exploring the Ruby Language

Organizational Meeting

• Welcome / Introductions / Backgrounds
• What is this group about?
• Web Site (www.iowaruby.org)
• Mailing List(s) Please subscribe!
• Meetings
  • Dates / Times
  • Topics / Speakers / Volunteers?
• Social interaction, food, etc.
• Anything else?  Announcements?

Getting Started with Ruby

• What is Ruby?
• Installing Ruby
• Ruby Language

What is Ruby?

A dynamic, open source programming language created by Yukihiro Matsumoto ("Matz") and first released in 1995.

• Simple
• Productive
• Fun

Ruby is also...

• Dynamic
• Object-Oriented
• "Wonderfully powerful and useful" --Martin Fowler
• Beautiful

"[M]ore powerful than Perl, and more object-oriented than Python." --Matz

Ruby Community

• Web Resources, Newsgroups, Mailing Lists, Blogs
• IRC Channels
• Books
• Ruby Conferences
• Ruby User Groups

Installing Ruby

• Windows
• Linux
• Macintosh OS X

See the resources available at www.ruby-lang.org.

Be sure to install Ruby Gems.

Ruby and it's World

• Ruby Language
• Text Editors / IDE's
• Interactive Ruby (irb)
• Documentation (ri / rdoc)
• Ruby Gems

Ruby Language

Show me the code!

Most of the code we looked at was based on the Ruby in Twenty Minutes tutorial.

Here is the Hpricot example we saw at the end.

  #!/usr/bin/env ruby

  require 'rubygems'
  require 'hpricot'
  require 'open-uri'

  doc = Hpricot(open("http://www.nytimes.com/"))
  headlines = doc.search("h1, h2, h3, h4, h5, h6")
  headlines.each do |h|
    puts h.innerText.strip
  end

Recommended Reading

	Programming Ruby: The Pragmatic Programmers' Guide, 2nd ed. ("PickAxe") (2005), Dave Thomas, et al.
	Agile Web Development with Rails, 2nd ed. (2006), Dave Thomas, David Heinemeier Hannson, et al.
	Ruby for Rails (2006), David A. Black
	The Ruby Way (2007), 2nd ed., Hal Fulton

Thank You!

• Thanks to DMACC for hosting us.

Next Meeting

• Thursday, October 18, 2007, (here at DMACC West)
• Check the web site www.iowaruby.org for details.