Last year, Ruby took OSCON by storm. This year, the Ruby track is stronger than ever. But just what is Ruby? What does it look like? How do I code it? What are the idioms, and where are the pitfalls.

If you were visiting some new, exotic place, you'd want to read a good guidebook before leaving, just to make sure you didn't miss the interesting bits when you got there. Think of this tutorial as your conference guidebook to Ruby.

We’ll spend the time looking at Ruby, the language that underlies Rails. We’ll take it from the ground up, showing you both the syntax and semantics and (we think more importantly) the idioms and the traps. You’ll come away knowing about blocks, meta-programming, open classes, and all the other things that are common in Rails programming.

This tutorial is given by Dave Thomas and Mike Clark, who wrote the books on Ruby and Rails.