Your First Ruby Program

ByWalter Wimberly

As with most languages, we always want to start with a “Hello World” program.

Remember, this is to make sure everything is working, as much as it is to learn the programming language.

For simplicity’s sake, we’re going to use the online editor: https://www.jdoodle.com/execute-ruby-online or https://www.onlinegdb.com/online_ruby_compiler

puts "Hello World"

You will notice right away that in Ruby, we don’t have a print or similar function. Instead, we use the puts command, and follow it with a literal string.

If you split our string into two strings like below:

puts "Hello", "World"

Then we’re going to get an interesting effect, where each string is printed on a separate line.

// code output
Hello
World

However, I can concatenate my strings to get them to print on a single line:

puts "Hello" + " " + "World"

With this, we should be good to move forward with programming in Ruby.

Your First Ruby Program was originally found on Access 2 Learn

Assistant Professor

Walter Wimberly is an Assistant Professor at a regional college in Tennessee, teaching Computer Science in the Software Engineering track. He works as a student advisor, oversees curriculum changes, develops new courses, and manages the advisory panel.
Walter taught full time for about 7 years, before going back into “industry” as a full stack Software Developer for a dozen years. There he focused on web based projects coding in JavaScript/jQuery and utilizing the Bootstrap CSS Framework on the front-end, and coding in PHP, ASP/ASP.Net, SQL on the back-end.

Since he loves teaching, he taught as an adjunct web and digital media classes for eight (8) years, while working in industry, and has since returned to teaching full time.

He has been married for over 25 years, and is father to several special needs boys. As such, he is working on some projects to help others who have special needs to be self-sufficient, and support the care givers of those with special needs. Check out his Autism blog for more info.

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