From: CParticle <cparticle@...>
Date: 2007-03-11T08:20:06+09:00
Subject: Re: A couple of questions from a Ruby neophyte

For what's its worth I think Ruby is the way to go.  It sounds like
you might be using vbscript to access some Windows specific
resources.  For my part about a year ago I switched away from VBscript
because I wanted a more portable language.  After looking around I
chose Ruby  I found the switch from vbscript fairly painless and
straight forward.  I've used win32ole to access AciveDirectory
resources.  I've also used the DBI module to connect to MSSQL and
while as has already been said DBI not the best documented it was
pretty simple even for a newbie like myself.  I think if you gave Ruby
a try yo umight be pleasantly surprised by what you find.

CParticle

On Mar 8, 7:08 am, "planetthoughtful" <planetthought...@gmail.com>
wrote:
> Hi All,
>
> I'm thinking about learning a new scripting language, and I have a
> couple of questions I'd like to ask the Ruby community to work out if
> Ruby is the language I should be learning.
>
> A little background: most of my usage will be based around writing
> console scripts that connect either to MSSQL (ie SQL Server), MySQL or
> Microsoft Access databases to perform imports / exports / selections
> etc, or it will be around pulling apart text file reports to identify
> valid records etc (and often then importing them into a DB). This will
> all be on a WinXP machine.
>
> I'm currently very conversant with PHP and VBScript and moderately
> conversant with C#.
>
> What I'm looking for:
>
> - A language that installs easily onto a WinXP machine, including any
> libraries required to do the following things listed below as well.
>
> - A language with solid and hopefully well-documented libraries for
> connecting to at least MySQL and MSSQL. Being able to connect to
> Microsoft Access via ODBC (or even better, natively) would be an extra
> bonus.
>
> - A language with a flexible array or array-like object. One of the
> things I love about PHP is the ease with which an array can be
> populated (eg "MyArray[] = 'a new value';" adds "a new value" as a new
> item to the array MyArray).
>
> - A language with strong Regular Expression abilities, and string
> manipulation tools / methods.
>
> What I don't (currently?) need:
>
> - Web support. I'm well aware of Ruby On Rails, and perhaps somewhere
> down the track I'll build web applications in it, but for the moment
> I'm looking strictly for a console scripting language to handle
> repetitive yet complex database oriented tasks.
>
> So, would anyone be able to help me work out if Ruby is the language I
> need?
>
> Many thanks to anyone who gives these questions some thought.
>
> Much warmth,
>
> pt