Make Sure You Have Ruby

To see whether you already have Ruby on your system, open a console window. If you're a Unix user, this will generally be something like an xterm window. If you're a Windows user, look in the Start menu for the MS-DOS prompt.

Now type ruby -v and press Return.

						% ruby
						-v
ruby 1.7.0 (2001-04-02) [i586-linux]

If the response is a Ruby version number and a creation date (not necessarily matching those shown here), we can move forward. If not, visit http://www.ruby-lang.org to download the right Ruby for your system. Installation instructions will come with whatever package you get, but if you need more help, refer to Appendix B of this book.

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