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Ruby Basics

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Your First Ruby Program

3:14 with Jay McGavren

In this video, we'll show you how to run your first Ruby program right in your browser, using Treehouse Workspaces.

[MUSIC] 0:00
Hi, I'm Jay McGavren, a web developer and teacher at Treehouse, and 0:04
I'm here to introduce you to the Ruby programming language. 0:08
Ruby is so easy to use, we're going to run our first program now. 0:12
I'm not kidding, let's do it right now. 0:16
If you're watching this video on the Treehouse site, 0:19
there should be a Launch Workspace button on the page. 0:22
Click that now. 0:24
You'll see a dialog where you can change the name of your new Workspace. 0:25
Or you can just keep the default. 0:28
Click the Launch it button when you're ready. 0:30
A new window will open with the Treehouse Workspace. 0:33
Give it a minute to load. 0:36
When it launches, you'll see a sidebar on the left with a single plain text file 0:37
named hello.rb, click that and it'll load in the text editor on the right. 0:41
As you can see, 0:46
it includes just one single line of code, that's the whole thing. 0:47
No defining classes or functions or any of the other stuff that other programming 0:51
languages require before you can get started. 0:56
Just one line of code and this program is ready to run. 0:58
So, let's run it. 1:02
Click in the console area at the bottom. 1:03
You'll know it's been activated if a blinking cursor appears down there. 1:05
Type ruby, a space, and the name of our program file. 1:09
Hello dot RB. 1:13
Then hit enter. 1:15
Ruby will run our program and print out the message from our code. 1:17
You can click in the editor and change the message if you want. 1:21
So up here instead of Hello, Ruby! 1:24
I'm going to say, Hello, Jay! 1:25
Save your work by clicking in the file menu and choosing save. 1:27
Then click on the console again and rerun the program. 1:32
If you want you can just hit the up arrow to bring up the previous command and 1:35
hit enter again, to run it again. 1:38
You see that this time it prints out the new text that we've typed 1:40
in at the editor. 1:43
When you're done you can close the window, 1:44
don't worry your changes will be saved on site's workspaces page. 1:46
Pretty cool right, because Ruby is so simple and easy to use, 1:53
it's one of the most flexible programming languages out there. 1:57
Ruby gets out of your way and lets you code, the way you want to. 2:02
This flexibility has allowed Ruby developers to create some incredibly 2:06
innovative software. 2:09
There's Bundler, a program that installs libraries of reusable code for you, so 2:11
your app can easily use code others have written. 2:15
There's SASS, a more powerful version of CSS, that lets you design styles for 2:18
web pages using less code. 2:23
There is Puppet, and Chef, two different programs which can both set up entire 2:25
operating systems, using directions in a simple text file. 2:29
And most importantly, there is Ruby On Rail, which is arguably, 2:34
the world's most powerful web framework. 2:37
Rails lets you easily create sites that write user data to a database, and 2:40
then serve it back up as webpages. 2:44
Rails in particular, helps make Ruby popular. 2:47
And the majority of Ruby jobs out there are working on Rails websites. 2:50
Once you understand the Ruby language, do yourself a favor and go on to learn Rails. 2:54
You'll be glad you did. 2:59
Other languages are starting to copy ideas that originated with these Ruby libraries. 3:00
This software was written in Ruby first, because Ruby gives developers the freedom 3:05
to experiment and find the perfect solution for their problem. 3:10