I’ve been in the habit (well I’ve usually not had a choice) of learning a new language each year or so.  I’ve always had an interest in scripting languages, this is not unusual as I started my programming life as a system administrator and I used VB scripting edition for all kinds of things.  I’ve since learned quite a few languages and some I’ve enjoyed and some I have not.  I looked into PERL last year as it is used where I work and I had read about it in The Pragmatic Programmer.  I was a little bit disappointed.  What a mess.  It seemed like a patched together hack and I was not much more productive then if I had simply used Java or C#.  With that out of the way, I was surprised to see a book published on-line by the authors of The Pragmatic Programmer. 

Programming Ruby is a book dedicated to the Ruby language.  Ruby is supposed to be simple to use and very object-oriented.  I have decided that this is the next language I will dive into.  One reason I am interested is the productivity promised by the Ruby on Rails framework. 

 
Here is a list of what I am expecting:

• Easy to learn
• Easy to use
• Minimal hassle
• Minimal quirks
• Free to use
• Good for web developing

 
Some things that I am interested in finding out:

• Data Access capabilities
• Availability of editors (code completion, etc)

 I will post again once I have read the book and coded enough to form an opinion of Ruby.