The past few years most of my programming experience has been in Java with C++ on the side. The past year or so I've had a lot of tech friends telling me I need to checkout Ruby. Since one of my earlier jobs where I inherited some nasty perl and jsp code I've usually tried to run away from scripting languages. After downloading ruby and Ruby Eclipse on my MacBook I have to say I'm very impressed.

Where java is mostly centered around building beautiful frameworks and utilizing inversion of control, Ruby is more about getting it done quickly and let the characteristics of the language handle the readability. Especially the Ruby on Rails framework, which is by far the easiest web framework have seen yet for database driven applications (notice I said database driven apps and not all web apps). I'm not saying Ruby replaces Java, but for some things I would seriously look at it.

Anyways, in an effort to learn more I bought a few books on amazon. First one is pretty much the Ruby Bible, The Pragamatic Guide to Ruby. The second is the associated book for Rails. Hopefully after some nights reading I'll have a better understanding of what I can do. I'm sure there will be more Ruby posts on their way.