Introduction

Ruby is a new, exciting, object-oriented scripting language but due to its status as a relative newcomer to the world of programming, one might expect that there is little support in the way of libraries and packages. On the contrary, because of Ruby's ease of extendibility, there exists a rapidly growing list of libraries and extensions. In this chapter we explore a small subset of that list, with the hope of both being immediately applied to current projects and also encouraging the reader to explore the marvelous contributions out there.

In this chapter we discuss five broad categories of topics. The first topic we describe will be graphics. Since the topic is rather broad and involved, we will expend our energy exposing some methodology. The second topic is algorithms and data structures; this will be broken up into two groups, those that deal with primarily mathematical notions and those that are of a more computer-science nature. The third topic to be discussed involves Ruby and Windows. Since we discussed GUI development in Chapter 2, we can focus here on other topics, such as COM and Active Script. The fourth topic is an examination of some convenient libraries which aid in object-oriented development. The final topic discusses cutting edge technologies that allow Ruby to interface with code written in other languages. This gives us as developers the ability to take advantage of the ease of Ruby development inside other environments such as Java and Python.