Welcome to the Comprehensive Ruby Programming Course! I'm excited to go through all the material and walk you through this great programming language.

I've been a programmer for more than a decade, and I started Ruby about five years ago. Since then, I absolutely fell in love with Ruby for a wide array of reasons. As you learn the language you'll discover that you spend less time worrying about syntax and more time coding, which adds to the fun. By the time you're finished with this course I hope you'll love this language as much as I do!

What is Ruby?

Ruby is an open source programming language, which means that it's free to use and it was developed by a large community of developers.

So what can you do with Ruby? By leveraging the Ruby programming language you can build many different types of applications. If you're interested in building dynamic web applications you will most likely want to learn the Ruby on Rails web framework. Since Rails is built on top of Ruby, it's beneficial to understand how to program in Ruby before you can use Rails properly.

Popular sites that use Ruby

So what sites use Ruby?

• hulu.com - a popular destination to watch TV shows and movies online.
• twitch.tv - a videogame-viewing site that was acquired by YouTube
• lumosity.com - a popular learning platform
• weheartit.com - a great entertainment site
• bloomberg.com - an application that processes news and financial data to give financial insights to users
• twitter.com - Probably the biggest Ruby on Rails application. This site showcases the scalability of Ruby and the Rails framework. Even though Twitter has expanded to include additional languages such as Scala and C, Ruby is still a core component of the site's architecture

Now that you know the kind of applications that we can build with Ruby, let's get started!