Ruby Developers Guide

An expert guide to Ruby, a popular new Object-Oriented Programming Language

Ruby is quickly becoming a favourite among developers who need a simple, straight forward, portable programming language. Ruby is ideal for quick and easy object-oriented programming such as processing text files or performing system management. Having been compared with other programming languages such as Perl, Python, PCL, Java, Eiffel, and C++; Ruby is popular because of its straight forward syntax and transparent semantics.
Using step-by-step examples and real world applications, the Ruby Developer's Guide is designed for programmers and developer's looking to embrace the object-oriented features and functionality of this robust programming language. Readers will learn how to develop, implement, organize and deploy applications using Ruby.

Lyle Johnson is a Software Team Leader at ResGen, Invitrogen Corporation in Huntsville, AL. Prior to his employment at ResGen, Lyle served as Group Leader for Graphical User Interface Development at CFD Research Corporation. Lyle has worked primarily in commercial software development for computational fluid dynamics and bioinformatics applications, but has also managed and contributed to a number of open-source software projects.

Lyle holds a bachelor's degree in Aerospace Engineering from Auburn University and a master's of Science degree in Aerospace Engineering from the Georgia Institute of Technology. He currently lives in Madison, AL with his wife, Denise.

Jonothon Ortiz is Vice President of Xnext, Inc. in Winter Haven, FL. Xnext, Inc. is a small, privately owned company that develops Web sites and applications for prestigious companies such as the New York Times Company. Jonothon is the head of the programming department and works together with the CEO on all company projects to ensure the best possible solution. Jonothon lives with his wife, Carla, in Lakeland, FL.

Robert Feldt is a Software Engineering Researcher at Chalmers University of Technology in Gothenburg, Sweden. His professional interest is in how to produce robust, reliable software. Robert’s research focuses on what can be learned from applying the complex but robust systems found in nature to tools and methods for developing and testing software. Robert also teaches courses on software engineering to students in the Computer Science and Computer Engineering programs at Chalmers University.

Robert holds a master’s degree from Chalmers University and is a member of the IEEE. He has previously worked as a consultant software engineer. He programs mostly in C, Haskell, and Ruby and uses Ruby frequently in his research since its dynamic nature allows him to easily test new ideas. He is working on a number of larger Ruby projects, including the Rockit compiler construction toolkit and the RubyVM project, to build a set of plug-and-play components for assembling Ruby virtual machines.

Robert currently resides in Gothenburg, Sweden with his wife, Mirjana, and daughter, Ebba. He wants to acknowledge them for their support and love.

Michael Neumann is a Database and Software Developer for Merlin.zwo InfoDesign GmbH in Germany (near Stuttgart). He is also studying computer science at the University of Karlsruhe. Merlin.zwo develops large-scale database applications based on Oracle products. With more than 10 years of experience in software development, Michael has specialized in many different domains, from system-near programming, administration of Unix systems, and database development with several RDBMSs, to OOA/OOD techniques, and design and implementation of distributed and parallel applications. One of his greatest interests lies is the design principles of programming languages. Before he was employed at Merlin.zwo, he was a Database/Web Developer and Principal of Page-Store.