If you are writing small Ruby programs and you don’t need facilities such as debugging available in a full fledged IDE, I recommend using Notepad++ editor. Notepad++ has built in syntax highlighting for Ruby and is a light weight and fully featured code editor. Download the latest version of Notepad++ from here. I recommend download […]

This is a step by step guide on installing and using Ruby language on Windows 7 machines. A lot of applications now use the 1.8.x branch of Ruby. However it is being deprecated and if you are starting Ruby programming, you should start with the 1.9.x branch. This tutorial covers Ruby 1.9.3, the latest production […]

For certain programming solutions, you might need a temporary file. Different operating systems store temporary files in different locations. Also you don’t want to explicitly name the file since that is irrelevant in the program. How do you ensure that there are no filename conflicts? The solution for all these is to use library for […]

Ruby has excellent networking support. Ruby has low level networking features such as sockets and tcp/ip protocols. It also has a high level API for handling protocols such as http and ftp. In this post we will look the Ruby http library. We also look at how this library can be used to download and […]

One of the advanced features of Ruby, which is behind the success of rails is the dynamic code execution. Code fragments can be executed using eval method. This is very similar to JavaScript eval function. following is an example, eval executes the code in the current context. It is also possible to execute the code […]

In this post I will look at various ways of interacting with a Ruby program’s runtime environment. Following sample program has methods to identify the operating system platform, environment variables in the OS and finding out the command line parameters.