As we head toward Christmas what could be more festive than learning a new programming language? As an early present (ho-ho-ho), we bring you a fascinating and highly useful language called Ruby.

Why would you want to learn yet another language? Well, Ruby is powerful, flexible, understandable, portable and simple. And it is free. (Also see "Thirty-seven Reasons I Love Ruby")

Created by Yukihiro Matsumoto (known as "Matz" to the Ruby community), Ruby runs on Unix, DOS, Windows 95/98/ME/NT/2000/XP, MacOS, BeOS (where it is called RuBe) and OS/2.

The Ruby site describes the language thusly: "Ruby is the interpreted scripting language for quick and easy object-oriented programming. It has many features to process text files and to do system management tasks (as in Perl) . . . has simple syntax, partially inspired by Eiffel and Ada . . . exception handling features, like Java or Python . . . is a complete, full, pure object-oriented language . . . needs no variable declarations . . . can load extension libraries dynamically if an [operating system allows. . . [and] features [operating system] independent threading."

This last point is very interesting, as you get multithreading regardless of whether the operating system supports it - even on MS-DOS! We can see you on Christmas day, decked out in your festive red jammies, eggnog in hand, the smell of turkey in the air, laptop on lap, humming a merry carol while learning Ruby.

First, download the latest release (when we did this the site was very slow). Ruby, of course, is open source, so you can build it from one of the three source versions: The stable release version, the stable snapshot (which might be buggy because it is the stable release version with new and possibly untested stuff), or the nightly development snapshot, which is for bleeding-edge test pilots.

Ruby also is available as binary distributions for Linux and Windows. You can get Red Hat Package Manager installation files for RPM-based Linux distributions from www.rpmfind.net, and you can use the apt-get utility for Debian dpkg-based systems.

The Windows version contains everything you need in a single Windows installer.

An important part of the Windows version is the inclusion of the Cygwin library. The full Cygwin release provides a Dynamic Link Library (DLL) that acts as a Linux API emulation layer for Windows along with a collection of Linux-derived tools.