O'Reilly Open Source Convention - August 1-5, 2005

Tutorial
Introduction to Ruby
Dave Thomas, Works for, The Pragmatic Programmers, LLC

Track: Ruby
Date: Monday, August 1st, 2005
Time: 8:30am - 12:00pm
Location: Portland 256
This tutorial is a fast-paced introduction to the Ruby language. We'll have slides, but we'll also have lots of code. Learn what the buzz is about as we write and run applications solving real-world problems.
We'll see how Ruby can make you incredibly productive for both the small jobs and the large ones. We'll discuss how the complete (but subtle) OO nature of Ruby lets you start with procedural code but seemlessly migrate to an OO style as the code grows over time (and you know it will grow).
We'll have a look at Duck Typing, a love-it-or-hate-it approach to code organization whch can make development, testing, and refactoring a breeze.
The tutorial isn't going to spend hours looking at syntax rules and library APIs--you're all competent programmers and can pick stuff like that up. Instead, this presentation aims to give you a sampling of different kinds of Ruby code so you can see for yourselves how Ruby can get things done for you.
In the last hour or so we'll develop a suite of applications that access the Web, use databases, and implement a simple web-based user interface. We'll end with a sneak-peak at Ruby-on-Rails, the new Ruby framework for web development that's grabbing mindshare world-wide. This will be a great introduction for folks wanting to attend the Rails tutorial that follows.