Interactive Ruby

Interactive Ruby Shell (IRB or irb) is a REPL for programming in the object-oriented scripting language Ruby. The abbreviation irb comes from the fact that the filename extension for Ruby is .rb, although interactive Ruby files do not have an extension of .irb.

The program is launched from a command line and allows the execution of Ruby commands with immediate response, experimenting in real-time. It features command history, line editing capabilities, and job control, and is able to communicate directly as a shell script over the Internet and interact with a live server.

NOTE: irb was developed by Keiju Ishitsuka.

Try yourself

In your terminal or shell, just type following

irb

Then, start playing with Ruby statements as

puts "Hello World"
puts 120
puts 15/2
puts 15.0/2

NOTE: This was just a intro of the IRB. We will play with it more in the later sections.