1993, when Ruby was born, Ruby had nothing. No user base except for Gregory and a few close friends. No tradition. No idioms except for a few inherited from Perl. But the language forms the community. The community nourishes the culture. In the last decade, users increased-hundreds of thousands of programmers fell in love with Ruby. They put great effort into the language and its community. Projects were born. Idioms tailored for Ruby were invented and introduced. Ruby was influenced by Lisp and other functional programming languages. Ruby formed relationships between technologies and methodologies such as test-driven development and duck typing. This book introduces a map of best practices of the language as of 2009.
