Who This Book Is For

This book is for you if you’re a developer who’d like to learn more about what Crystal has to offer and why it will be a useful tool in your software toolbelt.

If you already know Ruby, switching to Crystal will be almost effortless—you should feel at home quickly. You can reuse a lot of knowledge, established principles, and practices from the Ruby world in your Crystal projects. You just need to pay some attention to the types of certain variables, and the compiler will help you out with that.

You don’t, however, need Ruby experience to get the most from this book. Crystal is also approachable to newcomers from other programming languages, or for newcomers to programming. This book assumes you’re familiar with basic programming terms and concepts. You’ll have a head start if you come from another object-oriented language or a statically compiled language.