My view is you start out simple and straightforward. There are no Police 
to arrest you if you write procedural Ruby programs. I have many Ruby 
books and the impression I get is it is a complex, subtle and somewhat 
arcane language. I have no intention of ever learning reflection and 
that sort of thing. My long experience of IT tells me that code is a 
tiny part of solving problems and that clever code is rarely preferable 
to something simple and easy to understand. What I also want to avoid - 
like you - is having to learn lots of things at once so my advice is 
start off with raw Ruby out of the box, and only add layers as you 
become comfortable with what you've already learnt. You're not in this 
game to talk to clever people at conferences. You're here to build 
systems that work.
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