Well, disappointed but undaunted, I returned to Windows. I'll consider what to replace Debian with at a later time.

In the Windows distribution, there is a small console program called irb, Interactive Ruby. A majority of the exercises within Programming Ruby can be effectively run through this little program. The exercises do a good job of explaining the fundamental building blocks of Ruby, with a book-wide example of a jukebox program to tie it together.

The jukebox is not a full program, mind you, but an extended example. Often, I like to compose a full, short program [a word game, perhaps, where you guess letters in so many tries] to get the hang of things. Such little applications are fairly easy to do in Ruby.

Programming Ruby is a four-part book. The first covers generalities, mostly, and is an excellent introduction to the language. The second, Ruby In Its Setting, covers working with Ruby in various tasks and environments, such as the Windows API. The third part gets into more nitty-gritty details of programming, and the last is an exhaustive reference of all 98 libraries.

They are arranged, obviously, in an ascending order of complexity such that, depending on your familiarity with programming, you can scan here or concentrate there, focus in on whats important to you or read it all, front to back.

It is, without a doubt, valuable as THE standard work for Ruby, a virtual bible, and Mr. Thomas deserves resounding applause. With it in hand, its quite possible to move on towards making the application you've always wanted, but could never quite figure out how to do.

But its here that I have to fall back on my memory of working with Ruby prior to my unfortunate install. Ruby had/has very good libraries for GUI writing, including the Fox and TK packages. There's a newer manger for them, too, called Gems, which imports code to be used for whatever you please. And I shouldn't neglect Rails, though I have never seen it since Gems wouldn't work, which is a Rapid Applications Framework I've heard does wonders for producing good code swiftly.

All in all, going through this manual was a frustrating experience for me when it really shouldn't have been. I'm aware that many, many others have working, reliable Ruby setups, but it just didn't seem to gel over here, despite nigh-heroic attempts to do so. 6 different installs, including ActiveRuby and mingwin32, wouldn't cut it. The Mondrian IDE wouldn't start. The charming, friendly tutorials went sadly to waste. Nevertheless, I'm anxious to give it all another try- I'm hardheaded that way- as I can easily see that Ruby has a lot going for it.