BYTE.com > Mr. Computer Language Person > 2005
Potpourri
By Martin Heller
April 18, 2005
(Potpourri
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This month's column is something of a potpourri. Think of it as the briefly noted section of a magazine and you won't be far off. Let's start with Ruby.
Ruby 1.8.2
I've been following the Ruby programming language for about 4 years now. (See Another Gem; Something Old, Something New; and Ruby Update.) It's now up to version 1.8.2. It's still free, and still a very nice interpreted, object-oriented language. The Ruby runtime library has grown enormously, and so has the community using and supporting it.
The current distribution includes pretty much everything you'd expect from a language, free or not. I recently downloaded and installed the one-click Windows installer to have a fresh copy; I also have Ruby installed on several Linux distributions. In addition to the Ruby language interpreter, libraries, documentation, samples, and various extension packages, the Windows installation includes an interactive Ruby environment, IRB; TCL/TK 8.3; and two code editors: FreeRIDE and SciTE.
The distribution includes a compiled electronic edition of the book Programming Ruby. It's not the latest material, however: Programming Ruby, The Pragmatic Programmers' Guide: Second Edition, by Dave Thomas with Chad Fowler and Andy Hunt (Pragmatic Bookshelf, 2004; ISBN 0974514055), adds several hundred pages of material to the first edition and covers Ruby 1.8. In addition to being more current, the second edition is even better than the first, even though Thomas self-published the second edition under the Pragmatic Bookshelf imprint rather than doing another edition with Addison-Wesley. By the way, Thomas has written extensively about Ruby for Dr. Dobb's Journal, most recently about the RSS and Web support in Ruby 1.8.
FreeRIDE, the cross-platform and international Free Ruby IDE, is written in Ruby, and relies on several extensions: FOX, a cross-platform C/C++ GUI Toolkit; FXRuby, the Ruby interface to FOX; and FXScintilla, a FOX port of the BYTE.com > Mr. Computer Language Person > 2005
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