Perl is awesome. Perls docs are awesome. The Perl community is awesome. However, the language is fairly large and arguably complex. For those Perlers who long for a simpler time, a more orthogonal language, and elegant OO features built-in from the beginning, Ruby may be for you.

Similarities

As with Perl, in Ruby,...

• youve got a package management system, somewhat like CPAN (though its called RubyGems )
• regexes are built right in. Bon apptit!
• theres a fairly large number of commonly-used built-ins.
• parentheses are often optional
• strings work basically the same.
• theres a general delimited string and regex quoting syntax similar to Perls (looks like %q{this (single-quoted)} , or %Q{this (double-quotish)} , and %w{this for a single-quoted list of words} . You %Q|can| %Q(use) %Q^other^ delimiters if you like).
• youve got double-quotish variable interpolation, though it "looks #{like} this" (and you can put any Ruby code you like inside that #{} ).
• shell command expansion uses `backticks`.
• youve got embedded doc tools (Rubys is called rdoc).

Differences

Unlike Perl, in Ruby,...

• you dont have the context-dependent rules like with Perl.
• a variable isnt the same as the object to which it refers. Instead, its always just a reference to an object.
• although $ and @ are used as the first character in variable names sometimes, rather than indicating type, they indicate scope ( $ for globals, @ for object instance, and @@ for class attributes).
• array literals go in brackets instead of parentheses.
• composing lists of other lists does not flatten them into one big list. Instead you get an array of arrays.
• its def instead of sub .
• theres no semicolons needed at the end of each line. Incidentally, you end things like function definitions, class definitions, and case statements with the end keyword.
• objects are strongly typed. Youll be manually calling foo.to_i , foo.to_s , etc., if you need to convert between types.
• theres no eq , ne , lt , gt , ge , nor le .
• theres no diamond operator. You usually use IO. some_func instead.
• the fat comma is only used for hash literals.
• theres no undef . In Ruby you have nil . nil is an object (like anything else in Ruby). Its not the same as an undefined variable. It evaluates to false if you treat it like a boolean.
• when tested for truth, only false and nil evaluate to a false value. Everything else is true (including 0 , 0.0 , and "0" ).
• theres no PerlMonks . Though the ruby-talk mailing list is a very helpful place. And weve also got a wiki and a faq .