Ruby is a programming language designed to make developers happy. It was created in Japan in the 1990s with one goal: code should be enjoyable to write and easy to read. Ruby powers Basecamp, Shopify, and GitHub's early code, and its framework Rails built some of the most famous startups of the last twenty years. If you want a first language that reads like plain English and lets you build real web apps quickly, Ruby is a wonderful choice.

How does Ruby work? Ruby is an interpreted language, so you write code and run it directly — no compilation step. It is fully object-oriented: everything in Ruby is an object, even numbers, and you call methods on them like 5.times or "hello".upcase . The syntax is famously flexible, with very little punctuation, so a Ruby program often looks like a set of simple sentences.…