Ruby.new
When we originally wrote this book, we had a grand plan (we were
younger then). We wanted to document the language from the top down,
starting with classes and objects, and ending with the nitty-gritty
syntax details. It seemed like a good idea at the time. After all,
most everything in Ruby is an object, so it made sense to talk about
objects first.
Or so we thought.
Unfortunately, it turns out to be difficult to describe a language
that way. If you haven't covered strings,
if statements,
assignments, and other details, it's difficult to write examples of
classes. Throughout our top-down description, we kept coming across
low-level details we needed to cover so that the example code would
make sense.
So, we came up with another grand plan (they don't call us pragmatic
for nothing). We'd still describe Ruby starting at the top. But before
we did that, we'd add a short chapter that described all the common
language features used in the examples along with the special vocabulary
used in Ruby, a kind of minitutorial to bootstrap us into the rest of
the book.
