How This Book Is Organized
Chapter 1 briefly introduces the Ruby programming language, highlights the language features, and discusses what makes Ruby unique.
Chapter 2 describes Ruby language syntax and covers command-line options, environment variables, lexical convention, literals, variables, operators, methods, control structures, object-oriented programming, and security.
Chapter 3 describes the core functionality built into the standard Ruby interpreter. This part contains descriptions for more than 800 built-in methods in 42 classes and modules.
Chapter 4 describes the useful libraries that come with the standard Ruby distribution, from network access via HTTP and CGI programming to data persistence using the DBM library.
Chapter 5 describes the tools that come with the
standard Ruby distribution—debugger, profiler, and
irb (Interactive Ruby)—and some useful tools
not bundled with the Ruby standard distribution.
Chapter 6 describes the features added to the development version of Ruby (1.7). Those features aren’t yet available in the current stable Version 1.6.5 but will be in the next stable version (1.8).
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