[ruby-talk:13134] Examples for a presentation?

I may be giving a quick introduction to Ruby to a Linux user group
over the weekend (ie, in the next 48 hours, Sydney time).

Dave Thomas has kindly allowed me to use his slides, and I've been
writing examples to go with some of them, over and above the code
that's in the slides themselves.

What I'd be interested in, if anyone can help me, would be some short
code snippets that show off some of Ruby's features (and I'm pretty
much a newbie, so I'm sure there are lots of things I don't know
about).

In particular, I would guess a lot of the audience will know perl, so
examples of how to do things that perl can do and that people think
are important features of perl would be useful, so when someone says
"perl can do this; can ruby?" I'll be able to show them how it's done.

Similarly for python I guess.

Note, I'm not looking to say "Ruby's better than X because ...", just
to be able to say "If you were to write stuff in ruby, you can still
do the things you currently do in X".  Of course, if the Ruby version
happens to be cleaner or more flexible in some way, so much the
better.

I'd prefer complete code snippets that I can actually run, but I'm
happy to write some code to call anything you can provide ... so long
as I understand how it works :-).

Thanks in advance.