Ruby - Associated Tools

Standard Ruby Tools

The standard Ruby distribution contains useful tools along with the interpreter and standard pbraries −

These tools help you debug and improve your Ruby programs without spending much effort. This tutorial will give you a very good start with these tools.

RubyGems −

RubyGems is a package utipty for Ruby, which installs Ruby software packages and keeps them up-to-date.

Ruby Debugger −

To help deal with bugs, the standard distribution of Ruby includes a debugger. This is very similar to gdb utipty, which can be used to debug complex programs.

Interactive Ruby (irb) −

irb (Interactive Ruby) was developed by Keiju Ishitsuka. It allows you to enter commands at the prompt and have the interpreter respond as if you were executing a program. irb is useful to experiment with or to explore Ruby.

Ruby Profiler −

Ruby profiler helps you to improve the performance of a slow program by finding the bottleneck.

Additional Ruby Tools

There are other useful tools that don t come bundled with the Ruby standard distribution. However, you do need to install them yourself.

eRuby: Embeded Ruby −

eRuby stands for embedded Ruby. It s a tool that embeds fragments of Ruby code in other files, such as HTML files similar to ASP, JSP and PHP.

ri: Ruby Interactive Reference −

When you have a question about the behavior of a certain method, you can invoke ri to read the brief explanation of the method.

For more information on Ruby tool and resources, have a look at Ruby Useful Resources.