CSE 413 23sp Ruby Resources

The main source for all things Ruby is http://www.ruby-lang.org/en/. There are links there to documentation, installation instructions, and a web page where you can try out Ruby without installing it. (But for CSE 413 you need to install Ruby locally and use irb for Ruby interactions with source files as well as interactive coding.)

Ruby Versions and Installation

We are only using very basic Ruby features, so almost any version of Ruby 2.x or later should be adequate for our purposes. There have been changes in the Ruby languages and library over the years but we're hoping that we won't run into significant problems because of that.

• The main Ruby download page is here. It includes links to source code and several different package managers, which range from fairly easy to somewhat tricky to use.
• Windows: If you run Windows and do not have Ruby installed, get a version of the RubyInstaller and select all of the options when you run it. We're not too particular about which version you use, although if you have no reason to pick a particular version it would probably be best to pick the current Ruby 2.7.x so we don't run into compatibility problems with Ruby on MacOS or the versions of Ruby used to evaluate assignments when they are submitted.
• MacOS: If you are running MacOS, a version of Ruby 2.x should already be installed. Try typing ruby -v in a terminal window to see if it is, and ignore any warning messages that MacOS may not include Ruby by default in future releases. If you want to install a different version of Ruby there seem to be two reasonable options for MacOS. The easiest seems to be to install Homebrew, which will also install the main MacOS developer tools (something that you may well want to do even if you aren't using it to install Ruby). Then use Homebrew (brew install ruby) to install the latest release of Ruby and follow the optional instructions at the end of the installation to add this version of Ruby to your terminal search path. The other fairly reasonable (but somewhat harder to configure) option is to install RVM, the classic Ruby package manager, and configure versions from there.
• Linux: If you have a Linux system, use your distribution's package manager to install the version of Ruby that you want.

In all cases, once you're done, open a terminal window and type ruby --v. You should see a message showing the version of Ruby that is available. Also type the command irb to verify that the Ruby command-line interpreter is available.

Documentation and References

Documentation: The Ruby documentation page has many good tutorials, manuals, and links to detailed infromation.

Reference material: See www.ruby-doc.org. You can also download copies of the reference pages to use when you're offline. We suggest you bookmark and use the reference pages for version 2.7.x or 3.0.x so you don't accidentally use newer libraries or Ruby features that might not be supported on the systems that we use to evaluate your code.

Books: The classic tutorial, including a basic class library reference, is Programming Ruby by Dave Thomas and colleagues. The first edition is available free online and covers most everything we need for CSE 413. More recent editions can be ordered through any bookstore, but you can also get electronic (pdf, ebook) versions as well as printed copies through the publisher's web site (Pragmatic Programmers).

Another good Ruby book is The Ruby Programming Language by David Flanagan and Yukihiro Matsumoto (the person who created Ruby). This can be accessed freely online by UW students through the O'Reilly Online website (use your @uw.edu email address to log on).

Let us know if you find other resources that would be good to add to this page. Post a note on the ed discussion board to let us know.