Way back in 2007 I wrote an article for DevX.com that was part of a “special issue” of sorts about Ruby.
My contribution was “10 Minutes to Your First Ruby Application” and (I hope) it gave something of a whirlwind tour of some of Ruby’s cooler features by walking the reader through a reasonably practicle, albeit slightly contrived, example.
The deal with DevX was that after some period of time the rights reverted back to me, so I put it up on Neurogami.
10 Minutes to Your First Ruby Application
I also added a comments section, and lately some folks have been kind enough to point out some problems.
I went through the article and the code again, and managed to dig up some of the original source code. I made some changes to the code and article (some errors were fixed and code was changed to reflect ruby 1.9.3), and have now updated that article.
I also uploaded the source code and added links to the relevant files throughout the article.
Writing a demo app that is both practical and educational, while avoiding too many contrivances, is a challenge. I’m still pretty happy with what I did. The article really does introduce a good number of important Ruby topics, including some that many tutorials sadly claim are “advanced” (and hence perpetuate weird fears about learning proper Ruby).