If You’re Using Windows

Click here to download a program that will install everything you need to use Ruby. Double click on the installer to start it up, and press “Next” a bunch of times to finish the installation. Once that’s done, click on the Start menu and click on the option that says “Run…”. Then, type the word “cmd” in the popup box and press “Ok.” The thing that should pop up after that is the Windows Command Line.

If You’re Using a Mac

Macs already have ruby installed on them. To start the mac command line, go to the “Applications” folder (where all your programs are) and open the “Utilities” folder. Inside of “Utilities,” double click on the program named “Terminal” to start the OS X Command Line.

This is it, you’re now ready to begin talking to the ruby interpreter. Type in the word “irb” and press enter. You have now entered into an interactive conversation with our buddy Ruby (“irb” stands for Interactive Ruby.) Let’s tell the computer to say hello to us:

print "Hello World"

(Whenever you see stuff that looks this, that means that it’s real live programming code and you can type it directly into irb.)

If all is well, ruby should hear you loud and clear and respond with something like: “Hello World”.

It didn’t, did it? Instead you probably saw “Hello World=> nil”, which is almost but not quite what we told the computer to say. What you have to remember is that programming is like speaking a language and, unless you’re speaking to a wall, someone is usually going to respond to what you say. That little “=> nil” at the end is ruby’s response to what you told it to do.

Understanding the response will take some time, so for now we’re just going to do that thing men are good at and ignore the other side of the conversation (if you’re a woman, don’t worry, “=> nil” is Ruby’s way of saying it has nothing intelligent to say – like when men grunt.) To make it easier on us, we’re going to use a slightly different command that makes it easier to ignore Ruby’s responses.

puts "Hello World"

Now you should see:

Hello World
=> nil


Ruby’s being considerate and stating his half of the conversation on the next line, where we can conveniently ignore it.

To Summarize: Like normal conversations, there are usually responses to the things you say. Every statement in the Ruby language produces a corresponding response from the computer.

The first step is to not be intimidated by what you might have heard about programming.  Programming code (the word used to represent stuff written in a programming language) does not look like this:

It looks like this:

print "Hello World"

Compare that to this: “La programación es fácil.” or “Программирование легко.” or even “編程容易。”

Learning a programming language is often easier than learning a different spoken language.  Every programming language out there is actually some form of english.  Like the preceding example shows, to print the words “Hello World” to the screen, you would type ‘ print “Hello World”.’  You may not understand how or why this works yet, but it’s a lot more understandable than any of the other languages I showed.

So Let’s Do It

Alright, let’s just quickly cover a few basics about what a programming language really is, then we’ll get cracking.

All computers speak a single language, called binary, which consists entirely of 0′s and 1′s. Because it can take thousands of 0′s and 1′s to write a simple sentence in computer language, programmers came up with special programming languages. These languages are understandable by humans, but can be easily translated into the computers’ native language of binary.

Of course, when I say “translated” I mean that another computer program (often called an “interpreter”) comes along and translates our programming statements. There are many different interpreters out there. All of them speak binary, but they all speak a different programming language. Let me introduce you to some of these interpreters:

Python’s a slick character and, as you can see, a big fan of white empty spaces. We’re not going to learn his native language because I can’t draw a snake very well. Perl is an interesting guy, but it’s really hard to tell what’s going on behind that shiny head of his. In fact, only those who know him well really understand what he’s saying. Ruby is really cool guy. You can tell he’s cool because he’s wearing sunglasses and he’s on a motorcycle. We’re going to learn Ruby’s language because we want to be cool like him.

So to summarize: Programming languages are easily understandable by humans and are converted into computer language (binary) by interpreters. There are many different interpreters, and each one speaks a different programming language. We’re going to learn Ruby’s language because it’s so totally awesome.

In leu of a blog, Sam seems to convey his thoughts in pure pastie (or, as rubymaverick put it “rant ala pastie”.)