Topics

• Ruby 1.8 vs. Ruby 1.9 vs. JRuby
  • And the others (Rubinus)
• Jargon (mixins, monkey-patching)
• List operations (functional programming)
• Ruby tools irb, gem, rake, spec
• Iterators/yield versus recursion

Lessons Learned

To install Ruby on Windows go for the one-click installer and then unzip 1.8.7 or 1.9 on top of it. In all honesty it might be easier to have people install JRuby or IronRuby depending on their background.

The Diakonos editor gem is fun but needs curses so it is only going to work for Unix people. It is also probably harder to use than Scite or TextMate.

"Harder to use? If it's harder to use than SciTE or TextMate, I want to know why. :)" #mathetes on FreeNode.