Annie Lowrey:

What seemed strangest about the disappearance was just how integral to the devoted community of Ruby programmers _why had been before his infosuicide. _why was not just famous within the Ruby community, but one of its creators. He had contributed thousands of lines of code to Ruby’s open-source libraries. He wrote one of the most famous guides to Ruby. Moreover, when the language was just gaining traction in the English-speaking world, _why became the equivalent of the Friday-evening bartender at the town’s only saloon, hosting a series of popular blogs and writing often on Ruby forums, evangelizing the language’s beauty and simplicity.

Have fun and make games, or hack your homework using Ruby!
Just tell your parents or teachers you're learning Ruby programming... ;)
Free and works on any computer.

Incidentally, Turing is also responsible for the first ever bug – his original implementation of a Universal Turing Machine has a couple, one of which is probably a dumb typo (which even I could spot when I read the paper). Another is more subtle, but still fixable. Somewhat delightfully, a young grad student, (Donald W Davies, who invented packet switching) spotted these bugs and told Turing...

With Ruby, and the gosu gem you can do it. It is fairly easy to get going. And if you follow our screencasts, you can have a game going in minutes!

Introducing an all new way to learn Ruby on Rails in the browser with no additional configuration needed.

Potentially useful resources.

Rails has evolved over the years, and this book has evolved along with it. We still start with a step-by-step walkthrough of building a real application, and in-depth chapters look at the built-in Rails features. This edition now gives new Ruby and Rails users more information on the Ruby language and takes more time to explain key concepts throughout. Best practices on how to apply Rails continue to change, and this edition keeps up. Examples use cookie backed sessions, HTTP authentication, and Active Record-based forms, and the book focuses throughout on the right way to use Rails. Additionally, this edition now reflects Ruby 1.9, a new release of Ruby with substantial functional and performance improvements.

"I took one (bad) computer science class in college, and I'm not a web developer. So in early 2008, when I decided I was finally going to build a web site I'd been fantasizing about for years, I was starting from scratch."