======================[ Readings ]======================

Read chapters 1 and 2 of the "Ruby Under the Microscope" book.
Contrast this with the Mitchell's textbook's ch. 4.1, which
treats the same concepts with more historical generality.

Read chapter 7 on hash tables. Every modern scripting language exposes
hash tables (dictionaries, hashes) as a basic language
construct. Perl, Python, and Ruby implement their objects systems
through their basic hash table types (when you get there, the lookup
of methods and superclasses may remind you of Common Lisp's packages
and symbol lookups in them).

You can read ahead to Chapters 3--5 to see more of the Ruby VM internals.

In the ruby/ subdirectory, find examples from the book that
we looked at in class. Note that you need _at least_ Ruby 2.0;
the version that came with your Mac is probably earlier.
Check with "ruby --version", install newer versions with ports
("port search ruby | grep ^ruby" should give you the names
 of available packages).

-----------------[ Learning Ruby ]-----------------

If you are new to Ruby, a quick language tutorial like 
https://www.ruby-lang.org/en/documentation/quickstart/
or a more detailed book like http://ruby-doc.com/docs/ProgrammingRuby/
will help. For a somewhat weird intro to Ruby, see
http://poignant.guide/book/ (it may or may not work for you).

I will expect you to pick up Ruby as we go along, so write small
programs in Ruby as you did in Lisp and explore.