Getting started with Ruby

What Ruby lacks more than anything is good starting points for getting into the language. There's a bunch of absolutely excellent resources out there, though. I've attempted to summarize the best of them by category.

Language (latest release by time of writing: 1.8.1)

• All: Source release for any platform
  
• Windows: Ruby Installer for Windows
  
• OS X: Pre-compiled disk image for OS X

Reference documentation

• Ruby Core Library: Complete methods listing and explanation for all the built-in Ruby classes, such as strings, hashes, and IO. Only covers 1.6.8 — supplement with What's New in Ruby 1.8.
  
• Ruby Standard Library: Ruby ships with about a hundred standard libraries. They're all documented in varying degree and collected in one easy bundle with this site.

Guides and books for programmers

• Ruby in Highlights: An introduction to Ruby by its creator Matz. Excellent for a quick overview and feel of the language.
  
• Programming Ruby: A thorough introduction and guide to Ruby for programmers written by the Pragmatic Programmers duo. Available in full-length form for free!
  
• The Ruby Way: Includes more advanced Ruby topics including an especially excellent chapter on OOP and Dynamicity in Ruby. Requires a Safari membership, though.
  
• Ruby Garden Wiki: Tons of great information about Ruby, such as OS X gotchas and Ruby usage in real life (convince your boss by name-dropping NASA, Lucent, and HP)

Guides for non-programmers

• Why’s (Poignant) Guide to Ruby: Hilarious and very aparte introduction to programming with Ruby — complete with cartoon series.
  
• Learn to Program: A thorough introduction to programming in general using Ruby as the learning language.

Ruby bloggers

• Chad Fowler (RubyGems), Rich Kilmer (RubyGems, Jabber4r), Dave Thomas (Pragmatic Programmers), Jim Weirich (Rake), Why (Poignant guide, YAML, RedCloth)
  
• Artima's Ruby Buzz Forum: Aggregated feed for a lot of Ruby bloggers.

Library & Applications Repositories

• Ruby Application Archive: More than a thousand projects across 200 categories. Nothing like learning about Ruby than reading lots of Ruby code.
  
• RubyForge: Hosts close to two hundred Ruby projects with CVS repositories and project management features. The place to publish your projects.

My favorite packages outside of the standard library

• Rake: Ant/make replacement for building and packaging projects. (See also the usage presentation)
  
• Log4r: Comprehensive logging package for needs that go beyond the simple Logger class in the standard library.
  
• DBI: Database abstraction layer. Run the same code on everything from MySQL and PostgreSQL to Oracle and DB2.
  
• MySQL: Native library for accessing MySQL through Ruby.
  
• FlexMock: Simple mock object for unit testing.
  
• RMagick: Wrapper for ImageMagick that makes image composition and altering a walk in the park.
  
• Madeleine: Object prevaylence port.

"What Ruby lacks more than anything is good starting points for getting into the language."

You said it! Thanks for the resources. The only reason that I haven't gotten into Ruby is that I haven't had the time to find the path to learning it...

Perhaps you should mention that www.ruby-doc.org has the most comprehensive list of known Ruby information sources [http://www.ruby-doc.org/articles/], an online reference for the latest core libraries [http://www.ruby-doc.org/docs/rdoc/1.9/], and numerous downloads [http://www.ruby-doc.org/downloads/] that include Ruby documentaiton bundles and conference videos.

You've read my mind. I've been looking for good "getting started" sites and info about using Ruby for web applications this entire past week.

Thanks a lot for the information!

Once you've grokked the Ruby basics, do have a look at the presentation I posted on the upcoming Rails framework for building web-applications in Ruby.

It's what I used to build Basecamp — the web-based project management tool designed by the experts at 37signals.