Summary

In this chapter, we covered the syntactic differences and similarities between PHP and Ruby, Ruby’s tools for readability, and Ruby’s syntactic flexibility. We also learned about the question mark (?) and the exclamation or bang symbol (!). Making it this far means that you are indeed trying to reuse your previous programming skills but with a new language: Ruby. This is a great start because you can skip one of the most difficult parts of learning a new language from scratch: the logical part. And while we’ve only seen the surface of Ruby, more importantly, we got a clear glimpse of how Ruby developers think when they’re writing code. We learned that to a Ruby developer, readability comes first. We not only use syntax and language constructs to make this possible but we also use objects to increase the code’s legibleness. The more it reads like a sentence, the better. We looked at some simple examples of Ruby, and while you could follow along, it was not the purpose of the exercise. It was more to pique your interest.

To move along on this learning path, we now need the proper tools to start writing and running Ruby code. In the next chapter, we will look at the different ways to install Ruby and set up our local environment so that we can start learning real examples of Ruby, and eventually follow along in the process.