About this book
... to the third edition of The Well-Grounded Rubyist.
Ruby is a general-purpose, object-oriented, interpreted programming language designed by Yukihiro “Matz” Matsumoto. Ruby was first announced in 1993. The first public release appeared in 1995, and the language became very popular in Japan during the 1990s. It’s known and admired for its expressiveness—its ability to do a lot with relatively little code—and for the elegance and visual smoothness of its syntax and style. Ruby has proven useful and productive in a wide variety of programming contexts, ranging from administrative scripting to device embedding, from web development to PDF document processing. Moreover, and at the risk of sounding non-technical, Ruby programming is fun. It’s designed that way. As Matz has said, Ruby is optimized for the programmer experience. Indeed, Ruby started as Matz’s pet project and gained attention and traction because so many other programmers got pleasure from the same kind of language design that Matz did.