Hello, Ruby!

As part of my professional development plans for the year, I’m learning the Ruby language and the Ruby on Rails framework. Now, I’m just getting started so I’m a complete newbie, but here’s the first program that we all write when we’re learning a language: Hello, world!

I’m using the “irb” REPL command instead of actually saving source file(s) at this point. Here’s how I started:

def hello_world
  puts "Hello, world!"
end

hello_world

Output: Hello, world!

Basic, right? Now, let’s take some user input, and say hello to an entered name.

def hello(name)
  puts "Hello, " + name + "!"
end

name = gets.chomp

hello(name)

Input: Russell Output: Hello, Russell!

If you just use gets, you will also receive the newline character on the input. The chomp function removes this character.

That’s all for now. I’ll be creating more posts as I continue learning Ruby.