How can we as educators and trainers communicate essential Object-Oriented concepts without getting caught up in syntax and implementation issues? Simple. Use Ruby with its simple syntax, partially inspired by Eiffel and Ada, as an interactive Object-Oriented scripting language. It gives the immediacy of interpreted BASIC with the power of a modern Object-Oriented language.
This tutorial shows how to use Ruby to demonstrate key object concepts; the distinctions between a class and an object, methods and variables, messages and methods, instance methods and class methods, instance variables and class variables. Inheritance is particularly easy to understand when new methods are added to superclasses after objects have already been created. '