People often ask me how to get started programming Ruby.

Whether you’re an experienced programmer, or you’ve never programmed before, this screencast will hopefully give you a good introduction to how to program with Ruby.

(see screencast below)

Try Ruby!

One of my favorite resources for learning Ruby is Try Ruby!, a web site that has a built-in Ruby console and it walks you through tutorials. It’s really quite ingenious. It tells you things to try and detects when you’ve tried that bit of code, at which point it brings you to the next page of the tutorial.

The Try Ruby! that’s currently online is slightly different from the original, and may currently have a few bugs, but it should be good enough to get you started.

Unfortunately, one of the Ruby community’s most beloved programmers recently mysteriously vanished, and he was the one that hosted the original Try Ruby!, so someone is trying to get it fully back up and running.

Installing and Playing

Really, the best way to learn any programming language is to download it and start playing around with it. Come up with some small task that you’d like to try to accomplish with the language and see if you can do it. Also, read other people’s code!

Luckily, Ruby is installed out-of-the-box on Mac OSX. It’s trivially easy to install on Linux (use your distro’s package manager). And there’s an installer for Windows that you can download and double-click to install (or use cygwin).

Additional References

There’s an online book available for learning Ruby that walks you through learning the whole language, from the very basics (for total beginners) to hardcore programming. Oh. And it has cartoon foxes.

It’s not for everyone and, a few chapters in, you might start to feel dizzy (or like you’re on an acid trip), but it’s a magnificent way to learn the basics. Every experienced Ruby programmer has read atleast the beginning of the book and it’s become a part of the community. It was created by Why the Lucky Stiff (aka _why), the programmer who recently disappeared.

If you prefer the usual boring programming language books, I recommend the Pickaxe book, which you’ll likely find on every Ruby programmer’s bookshelf.

Anyway, enjoy the screencast! I hope you enjoy learning to program with Ruby :)