In this chapter, you've seen networking at a pretty low level, and at the level of well-known application interfaces like telnet and SMTP. You've seen how distributed Ruby works, and you've been through a simple example of a drb application. You've seen ways to use Ruby for Web development, both server-side and CGI, and you've even taken a look at XML parsing in Ruby (tangentially related to Web development).
This might be one of the primary areas in which Ruby is used. Although it's not a networking or Web language as such, we feel that more applications in the future will be Web-based, Net-capable, or otherwise based on distributed computing.
Whether your primary use of Ruby is Net-related or not, we are confident that you have already found it to be a powerful and useful language. We also hope that this book has added to your knowledge and your programming pleasure, and we hope it has been a worthwhile contribution to the Ruby community as a whole.
