Installation and Setup

Learn to Program, Third Edition — by Chris Pine (8 / 116)

👈 Programming Languages | TOC | The Art of Programming 👉

You’ll be using three main tools when you program: a text editor (to write your programs), the Ruby interpreter (to run your programs), and your command line (which is how you tell your computer which programs you want to run).

Although there’s pretty much only one Ruby interpreter and one command line, there are many text editors to choose from — and some are much better for programming than others. A good text editor can help catch many of those “silly mistakes” that beginning programmers make. Oh, all right, that all programmers make. It makes your code much easier for yourself and others to read in a number of ways: by helping with indentation and formatting, by letting you set markers in your code (so you can easily return to something you’re working on), by helping you match up your parentheses, and most importantly by syntax coloring (coloring different parts of your code with different colors according to their meanings in the program). You’ll see syntax coloring in this book’s examples.

With so many good editors (and so many bad ones), it can be hard to know which one to choose. I’ll tell you which one I use in the setup appendix for your OS; that’ll have to be good enough for now. ☺ But whatever you choose as your text editor, do not use something like Word, Pages, or Google Docs. Aside from being made for an entirely different…