Ruby is a simple, dynamic programming language created by Yukihiro Matsumoto (also known as Matz). The language is a blend of features provided in different languages such as Perl, Smalltalk, Lisp, and so on. Ruby was developed with an aim to provide a new language that balanced functional programming with imperative programming.
As mentioned earlier, you don't have to be a hardcore Ruby developer. Following are the things that we'll cover in this chapter, which will allow you to make the best use of Chef:
Variables and types
Basic operations
Conditional statements and loops
Blocks
Arrays and hashes
Yeah, we just need to learn about these five components of the language and we are all set to conquer the world of Chef.
However, before we go ahead with our journey into the fascinating world of Ruby, let's take a quick look at IRB. This is one of those tools that can really help you while playing with small Ruby code snippets.