Appendix A. Getting Hold of Ruby

The good thing about using a popular language is that it is not hard to find. With Ruby, the place to start is the Ruby language home page, located at http://www.ruby-lang.org. What you do from there pretty much depends on what kind of computer you are using.

Installing Ruby on Microsoft Windows

If you are running Microsoft Windows, your best bet is probably the One-Click Ruby Installer, which you can find at http://rubyforge.org/projects/rubyinstaller. This installer will put the basic Ruby environment along with a whole range of useful utilities on your system with only slightly more than one click. Make sure that you enable the RubyGems option to get the standard Ruby third-party code manager.

If you are more of a UNIX-oriented user who happens to use Windows, you might want to look into Cygwin (http://www.cygwin.com), a UNIX-like environment for Windows that comes complete with Ruby.

Installing Ruby on Linux and Other UNIX-Style Systems

If you are using a UNIX-like system such as Linux, you usually have a choice:

• Install a prebuilt package. Chances are that a prebuilt Ruby is available for your system. Make sure that you also install RubyGems to get the standard Ruby third-party code manager. If you use Debian Linux or one of its derivatives (which include the very popular Ubuntu Linux), you should be aware that because of philosophical differences about how software should be packaged, RubyGems is not available as a prebuilt Debian package. If you find yourself in this bind, you might consider building Ruby from source.
• Build Ruby from source. Building your Ruby environment from source is not really very difficult. Simply download the software and follow the instructions in the README file. After you finish with Ruby itself, you will also want to pull down the RubyGems source and build that, too.

Mac OS X

The good news is that OS X Tiger comes with Ruby right out of the box. The bad news is that what comes out of the box is an older version of Ruby. Many—perhaps most—users of Ruby on OS X prefer to build Ruby from source (see the previous section) or to get Ruby from MacPorts (http://www.macports.org/).

As I write this OS X Leopard has been released with much improved Ruby support. So perhaps it is all good news....