Hi Sonia, On 17/11/06, Sonia Hamilton <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote:
I'm thinking of learning Ruby ...
Yay! Another rubyist! One thing I can say, if you like oop, you will probably like ruby.
- is there an easy way of running Perl and Python code/libraries from Ruby? I've googled and browsed manuals in Dymocks Library ^H^H^H Bookshop, can't seem to find an answer.
This cropped up on the ruby talk list with regards perl in late September - http://blade.nagaokaut.ac.jp/cgi-bin/scat.rb/ruby/ruby-talk/217173. Looking at the thread I'm not sure if there was a consensus - certainly no magical wrapping utility was mentioned when I last checked. You can run perl from C. And you can run/use C from ruby so if you're desperate you can bolt something together that way, maybe after a couple of beers. Some of the more common things in perl are replicated, sort of, in ruby. There is a CGI module and also dbi/dbd for instance, but the latter is nothing like as complete as perl. You might want to check out rubyforge.org, as well as the Pragmatic Programmer's Guide book which takes you through some of the more common modules which come with ruby.
Reason I ask is that I want to learn Ruby for Ruby on Rails, but there's so much good stuff in the existing Perl and Python libraries/cpan.
Definitely recommend you try rails out, and get used to its brand of MVC - you may not need whatever it is because rails comes with a lot of stuff but it takes time to exploit all of it (including some of its conventions). I usually install ruby from source (esp. on debian systems), and then set up rake and gems from source as well. Then use the gem utility to install rails and database stuff. Ruby gems will also handle multiple versions of rails.
(Yes I know about Python/Django, but Rails seems to have better doco/manuals at the moment). -- Sonia Hamilton. GPG key A8B77238. -- SLUG - Sydney Linux User's Group Mailing List - http://slug.org.au/ Subscription info and FAQs: http://slug.org.au/faq/mailinglists.html
Daniel -- SLUG - Sydney Linux User's Group Mailing List - http://slug.org.au/ Subscription info and FAQs: http://slug.org.au/faq/mailinglists.html
