From: Paul Legato <pjlegato@...>
Date: 2006-01-05T10:47:27+09:00
Subject: Re: using irb

John Maclean wrote:
> it seems as is irb is a better "place" or "way" to try out stuff. This correct?

irb is great for rapidly getting a feel for how things work, since you 
get instant feedback on each line. If something doesn't go as expected, 
you can instantly start experimenting on the live state of ruby to 
figure out what's going on.

That said, it is not necessarily the best tool for every job, and I 
certainly wouldn't recommend using it alone. I often keep an irb running 
in a shell window while I'm running a script in another shell, which I'm 
editing in emacs. (Emacs has all kinds of integrated stuff for running 
ruby directly that I haven't looked into yet, too.)

irb know-how also carries over directly into the Ruby debugger ("ruby -r 
debug yourscript.rb"), another great way to figure out how things work.

Best,
Paul