Chapter 15. Ruby and Data Formats

14.10. Conclusion

That ends our discussion of Ruby scripting for everyday automation tasks. We've seen how to get information in and out of a program by way of environment variables and standard I/O. We've seen how to perform many common "glue" operations to get other pieces of software to talk to each other. We've also looked at how to interact with the operating system at various levels.

Because much of this material is operating-system dependent, I urge you to experiment on your own. There are differences between Windows and UNIX, and there are even differences in behavior within those families.

Our next topic is a similarly broad one. We'll look at using Ruby to process various kinds of data formats, from image files to XML.