Ruby Tutorial

Here's a basic tutorial for Ruby programming, introducing some key elements of the language.

1. Installing Ruby

Before you start coding, you need to ensure that Ruby is installed on your machine. If you're on a Unix-like system such as Linux or MacOS, you likely already have Ruby installed. You can check by typing ruby -v in your terminal. If Ruby is not installed, you can download it from the official Ruby website or use a version manager like rbenv or rvm.

2. Your First Ruby Program

Once Ruby is installed, you can write your first Ruby program. Open a text editor, type the following line, and save the file as hello_world.rb:

puts "Hello, world!"

You can run this program by typing ruby hello_world.rb in your terminal. You should see the text "Hello, world!" printed in the console.

3. Variables and Data Types

Ruby has several basic data types, including numbers, strings, arrays, and hashes:

# This is a comment

number = 5  # Integer
pi = 3.14   # Float
name = "Alice"  # String
is_tall = true  # Boolean
fruits = ["apple", "banana", "cherry"]  # Array
person = { "name" => "Alice", "age" => 30 }  # Hash

4. Control Flow

Ruby has several control flow structures, including if, else, while, for, and case:

age = 18

if age >= 18
  puts "You are an adult"
else
  puts "You are a minor"
end

5. Loops

Here's an example of a loop in Ruby:

5.times do |i|
  puts "This is iteration number #{i}"
end

6. Methods

You can define methods in Ruby using the def keyword:

def greet(name)
  puts "Hello, #{name}!"
end

greet("Alice")

7. Classes

Ruby is an object-oriented language, and you can define classes like this:

class Person
  def initialize(name, age)
    @name = name
    @age = age
  end

  def introduce
    puts "Hello, my name is #{@name} and I'm #{@age} years old."
  end
end

alice = Person.new("Alice", 30)
alice.introduce

8. Gems

Ruby has a rich ecosystem of libraries, known as gems. You can install a gem with the command gem install <gem_name>. For example, to install the popular HTTP library httparty, you would run gem install httparty.

This is a very basic introduction to Ruby. The language has many more features, including modules, error handling, file I/O, and more.