Chapter 1. Bootstrapping your Ruby literacy¶

This chapter discusses basic Ruby syntax and techniques and how Ruby works, including three fundamental levels:

• Core language: design principles, syntax, and semantics
• Extensions and libraries that ship with Ruby, and the facilities for adding extensions of your own
• Command-line tools that come with Ruby, with which you run the interpreter and some other important utilities

Basic Ruby language literacy¶

The examples in this book use Ruby 2.1.0. The irb utility ships with Ruby and is the most widely used Ruby command-line tool other than the interpreter itself. The irb examples in this book will use a command-line option that makes irb output easier to read:

irb --simple-prompt