title: An introduction to scripting in Ruby for biologists.
abstract: The Ruby programming language has a lot to offer to any scientist with electronic data to process. Not only is the initial learning curve very shallow, but its reflection and meta-programming capabilities allow for the rapid creation of relatively complex applications while still keeping the code short and readable. This paper provides a gentle introduction to this scripting language for researchers without formal informatics training such as many wet-lab scientists. We hope this will provide such researchers an idea of how powerful a tool Ruby can be for their data management tasks and encourage them to learn more about it.
authors.forename: Jan
authors.initials: J
authors.lastname: Aerts
authors.forename: Andy
authors.initials: A
authors.lastname: Law
mesh_terms: D019295:Computational Biology; D016208:Databases, Factual; D011381:Programming Languages