ABSTRACT
This chapter is a brief introduction to Ruby, the programming language we will use for the projects in the rest of the book. The tutorial project for this chapter is a simple program to convert temperature values from Fahrenheit to Celsius. The algorithm is trivial-the temperature conversion only requires Ruby to compute the value of a single equation-but going through the steps of implementing the program in Ruby is a good way to learn about the language and how we can use it for computational experiments. Once we get through the basics of how to set up and run experiments with Ruby we’ll be ready to tackle the more challenging projects in later chapters.
