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Welcome to Ruby for Rails. This book is an introduction to the Ruby programming language, purpose-written for people whose main reason for wanting to know Ruby is that they’re working with, or are interested in working with, the Ruby on Rails framework and want to do Rails knowledgeably and right.

Ruby is a general-purpose, object-oriented, interpreted programming language designed and written by Yukihiro Matsumoto (known widely as “Matz”). Introduced in 1994, Ruby rose rapidly in popularity among Japanese programmers. By the early 2000s, more than twenty Japanese-language books on Ruby had been published. The first English-language book on Ruby, Programming Ruby by Dave Thomas and Andy Hunt, appeared in late 2000 and ushered in a wave of Ruby enthusiasm outside of Japan. Ruby’s popularity in the West has grown steadily since the appearance of the “Pickaxe book” (the nickname of the Thomas-Hunt work, derived from its cover illustration).