Ruby, a new, object-oriented scripting language, has won over thousands of Perl and Python programmers in Japan -- and it's now launching worldwide. This is the world's first English-language developer's guide to Ruby. Written by the two leading Ruby developers, Programming Ruby demonstrates Ruby's compelling advantages, and serves as a start-to-finish tutorial and reference for every developer. The authors introduce all of Ruby's basics, including classes, objects, variables, container, iterators, types, methods, expressions, modules, I/O, and threads. You'll master Ruby development for the Web, including CGI scripts and embedding Ruby in HTML; learn how to create GUI-based Ruby applications with TK; and discover techniques for integrating Ruby with Windows. Programming Ruby shows how to extend Ruby in C, and presents in-depth coverage of advanced features. Numerous fully functional code examples are included. The book contains an alphabetical reference to Ruby 1.6 -- the latest version -- documenting over 800 methods, 40 built-in classes, and many useful library modules.