Welcome to the Comprehensive Ruby Programming book! I'm excited to go through all the materials and walk you through this great programming language.

I've been a programmer for more than a decade, and I started Ruby about five years ago. Since then, I absolutely fell in love with Ruby for a wide array of reasons. As you learn the language you'll discover that you spend less time worrying about the syntax and more time coding, which adds to the fun. By the time you're finished with this course I hope you'll love this language as much as I do!

In this chapter, we'll take a high level view of the Ruby programming language, learn how to install it on your system, and get it up and running so you can start building Ruby programs. By the end of this chapter, you will have learnt the following:

• Describe the high level concepts of the Ruby programming language
• Construct the configuration to run Ruby programs
• Define how to work with multiple Ruby versions