Paraphernalia You'll Need if You're Going to Get Hooked on Ruby
Dewayne: Given that the natural stopping point for our talking about a programming language named Ruby came an hour and a half into sitting in your car in my driveway, I believe I can safely say that you and I are geeks.
So, here are some references to help you get hooked:
~Ruby: An awesome language—interstingly enough invented by an LDS Japanese awesome guy called Matz, who last I checked is in a stake presidency—that is different from other languages (hence the different name). A couple of my favorite differences: great support for Arrays, easy iteration. It’s not too hard to learn initially, though once you get into it, you’ll discover there is a lot of awesomeness you can imbibe. You’ll notice a strange lingo in the community where they use words like “awesomeness” and some really funny names for things (programmers’ sense of humor rules).
RubyInside: This is my leisure reading. When I need a little pick-me-up, I check to see if there’s an updated entry (it’s not clear that I am as immensely geeky as this makes me sound, but I really do enjoy reading the blog). It’s great because it’s well written, is a great review of other people’s work, and covers a lot of different topics beyond Ruby as well.
RubyFlow: If RubyInside is a great edited synopsis of good things in the ruby world, then RubyFlow is a great un-edited community generated announcement summary board where people can post their own cool stuff they’re doing. This might sound like it could quickly be abused and just be awful, but it isn’t. It’s not awful. It’s great.
Heroku: really, really easy deployment of cloud-computing apps. Not tied to Ruby, but a bunch of Ruby people talk about and use it.
NoSQL_: There are alternatives to SQL and RDBMS (Relational Database Management Systems). MongoDB is an interesting one. Also not tied to Ruby.