I’m not going to list down “improve Ruby skills” on my New Year’s resolution. With the newly released Ruby 1.9.0 (a development release) and beta book Programming Ruby 3 by Dave Thomas (or simply Pickaxe 3), what better time to dig deeper into Ruby than now?

When I setup Rails on my mac a few months back (before Leopard and Rails 2.0), I followed Building Ruby, Rails, Subversion, Mongrel, and MySQL on Mac OS X by Hivelogic. Following the Ruby part of that but updated for Ruby 1.9:

  cd /usr/local
  sudo curl -O  ftp://ftp.ruby-lang.org/pub/ruby/1.9/ruby-1.9.0-0.tar.gz
  sudo tar xzvf ruby-1.9.0-0.tar.gz
  cd ruby-1.9.0-0
  sudo ./configure --prefix=/usr/local/ruby-1.9.0 --enable-pthread --with-readline-dir=/usr/local
  sudo make
  sudo make install

I didn’t have to run ‘make install-doc’ because ‘make install’ already installed the documentation. Since I haven’t upgraded to Leopard yet, this has only been verified on Tiger. Running ‘/usr/local/ruby-1.9.0/bin/ruby -v’, I got

  ruby 1.9.0 (2007-12-25 revision 14709) [i686-darwin8.11.1]

Cool! And I just bought Pickaxe 3 (right after installing). Looking for the first 1.9 feature I can find in the book… a new hash syntax:

  $ /usr/local/ruby-1.9.0/bin/irb
  irb(main):001:0> inst_section = { cello: 'string', clarinet: 'woodwind' }
  => {:cello=>"string", :clarinet=>"woodwind"}
  irb(main):002:0> inst_section[:clarinet]
  => "woodwind"

It works! And let me just add that new hash syntax looks gorgeous. Now I have to end this article and try a 1.9 feature beyond mere syntax updates. Chapter 11: Fibers, Threads, and Processes looks like a good place to start…

Update 12/26/2007: I initially installed Ruby 1.9 on /usr/local. It installed rubygems 1.0.1 with it and messed up my gem installation for 1.8.6. I had to reinstall 1.8.6, and then reinstall ruby 1.9 in an isolated directory, /usr/local/ruby-1.9.0. I updated the article to use this directory. For now, I only use 1.9 to try the new features. If you need to work with multiple versions of Ruby, you might want to check out Dan Manges’ article.