The time has come for you to begin writing simple programs. Before you can do that, you need to install Ruby. This is explained in Appendix B at the back of the book.
The next thing to learn is how to save your work. When writing a computer program (informally called code), it is often important to be able to save it as a plain text file, which can be opened and used later.
To save a program, you must first open a piece of software that
allows you to create, save, and edit text files. These programs are
called text editors, and examples include Notepad,
Scite (included in the one-click installation of Ruby), and many others
we discuss in Appendix C. For more
advanced editors, you may want to look into vim
and emacs
. There is also a version of the
integrated development environment (IDE) Eclipse that works with Ruby.
Eclipse includes a plain text editor. Once a text editor is open, be
sure it is set to save as an unformatted text file
(FileName.txt). Most word processors, such as Word,
add special characters for document formatting, so these should not be
used for writing programs. If special characters are turned off by
saving the document as a plain text file (.txt),
you can use various word processing programs, such as Word.
Now you are ready to write and save programs.
Plain text files (sometimes seen with the extension .txt) are stored as a simple sequence of characters in memory. For example, files created with Notepad on Windows are plain text files. Try to open a Microsoft Word document in Notepad and observe the results. Non-plain text files are commonly called binary files.
18.191.235.62