Ruby Programming Language

Ruby programming language (ruby-lang.org) is a general-purpose scripting language. It was created in the 1990s, and was architected for programmer happiness. Software representation of the programs written in Ruby, standardly, are free of static typing and superfluous punctuation marks. As software engineers are crafty, and some prefer things like static typing, extensions to the standard Ruby library exist which add in such features.

Ruby is an interpreted language. This is in contrast to compiled languages (such as C++ and Rust). Interpretation and compilation refer to how the software is read by a machine. A software program written Rust is first compiled into bytecode. The bytecode artifact is then executed directly by the host system's processor. For an interpreted language such as Ruby, when then program is executed, an interpreter process is started. The interpreter lexically parses exactly what was written by the software program at runtime.

The goal of this material is a solid understanding of Ruby language constructs which will be tested by algorithmic practice found in the Exercises section.