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title: "Ruby Compendium – 10 Good Things about Ruby"
content-type: page
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<nav class="navigation"><a href="/ruby-compendium/book/language.html">← Quick Tour</a> | <a href="/ruby-compendium/book/index.html">Contents</a> | <a href="/ruby-compendium/book/implementations.html">Versions and Implementations →</a></nav>
<ol>
	<li>It&#8217;s free and open source.</li>
	<li>It&#8217;s high-level, no need to worry about memory allocation or similar.</li>
	<li>It&#8217;s fully cross platform, or at least most of its <a href="/ruby-compendium/book/implementations.html#implementations">implementations</a> are.</li>
	<li>It&#8217;s elegant. Really, Ruby <a href="/ruby-compendium/book/syntax.html#syntax">syntax</a> is truly beautiful, with no semicolons or braces, generally.</li>
	<li>It has a large <a href="/ruby-compendium/book/core-stdlib.html#core-stdlib">core and Standard Library</a>.</li>
	<li>It has over 1300 user-contributed <a href="/ruby-compendium/book/gems.html#gems">libraries</a> for almost anything you can think of.</li>
	<li>It is multi-paradigm and offers many advanced language <a href="/ruby-compendium/book/features.html#features">features</a>.</li>
	<li>It has a friendly and supportive community and plenty of useful <a href="/ruby-compendium/book/resources.html#resources">resources</a>.</li>
	<li>There are loads of <a href="/ruby-compendium/book/web-sites.html#websites">web sites</a> about it and free online learning material.</li>
	<li>A lot of <a href="/ruby-compendium/book/books.html#books">books</a> have been written about it.</li>
</ol>
<aside class="box">
<div class="box-title">If you want to know more...</div>
For general information on Ruby and more introductory material, head over to the <a href="http://www.ruby-lang.org/">Official Ruby Web Site</a>, in particular to the <a href="http://www.ruby-lang.org/en/documentation/ruby-from-other-languages/">Ruby from Other Languages</a> articles, if you are already familiar with C, C++, Java, PHP, Perl, or Python.

</aside>
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