>>ISTR Rick Borup has gotten into RoR in a big way. He's not on this forum much anymore.
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>Al (and Alex),
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>FWIW I just published "An Introduction to Ruby and Rails", the white paper from my pre-con session at Southwest Fox 2010. This paper introduces both the Ruby language and the Rails framework, focusing on their installation and use on a Windows® platform with a perspective geared toward experienced Visual FoxPro® developers. It's available for download from the Fox developers page of my website at http://www.ita-software.com/foxpage.aspx.
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>I hope anyone reading it finds it to be a good starting place for VFP developers who are interested in Ruby and Rails. It's probably unique in its perspective, but there are literally hundreds of great resources out there; the paper includes references to several of the ones I found most useful. There's also a more recent book not referenced in the paper that looks really interesting: "Ruby on Rails 3 Tutorial" by Michael Hartl (December 2010, ISBN 0321743121).
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>-Rick

Very nicely explained. It's nice to have Ruby syntax described from a VFP point of view. You would do a favor to Ruby beginners with a VFP background by placing the reference to your article in the UT downloads.

I found your explanation for Ruby symbols especially clear. When you indicate that Ruby references the entries in the symbol table by their position in the table because that is faster than doing a string comparison on their name it makes much more sense than talking about "the thing whose name is" which I have seen before but had no idea what the heck meant.

Alex