sp00fD <sp00fD / yahoo.com> writes:

> I just installed the interpreter, so where do I get started?  I hit the
> ruby homepage, but I swear I didn't see a tutorial there.  Most of it
> seems easy enough, the iterator is getting me a bit (i.e. |x|).

You might want to have a look at

  http://www.math.sci.hokudai.ac.jp/%7Egotoken/ruby/ruby-uguide/

There's also a good introduction in Matz's article at

  http://www.informit.com/matter/art0000016/

> Also, I noticed that a book will be
> available (in English) in October, is this still the correct
> timeframe?  What's the title?  Any plans for an O'Reilly series.

There are a couple of books due out in English. Ours is called
'Programming Ruby', published by AWL. I'm not sure if the second on is 
public knowledge ;-)

> is there a perldoc or print <function>.__doc__ equivalent in Ruby?
> I thought I read that there was, but what is it?  And how do I find
> out about the available libraries and their capabilities?

There's a RD format, which is like Perl's POD documentation. You can
also write your own docstrings capability--I suspect that we won't see 
an urgent need for docstrings until we get a Ruby browser up and
running.

There's a complete list of the Ruby classes, modules, and methods at

   http://dev.rubycentral.com/ref/index.html

> P.S. one last thing, does Ruby support unicode (I can only imagine that
> it does, author being japanese and all...just making sure).

Not yet--it does support multibyte encodings for coding systems such
as SJIS. I believe Unicode is being considered.



Regards


Dave