Ruby is a genuine object-oriented language. Everything you manipulate is an object, and the results of those manipulations are themselves objects.
In Ruby, you can access all the underlying operating system features. You can do the same stuff in Ruby that you can in Perl or Python, and you can do it more cleanly. But Ruby is fundamentally different. It is a true programming language, too, with strong theoretical roots and an elegant, lightweight syntax. You could hack together a mess of "scripts" with Ruby, but you probably won't. Instead, you'll be more inclined to engineer a solution, to produce a program that is easy to understand, simple to maintain, and a piece of cake to extend and reuse in the future.
Publisher: Addison Wesley
Author: Yukihiro Matsumoto, a.k.a. "Matz"