In order to get a familiar with Ruby syntax before diving into a real project, I did a couple of things to practice.

The first was to use the Try Ruby online playground – this took me a bit more than an hour and can be done in the browser without installing anything, and guides you through the basics of Ruby’s syntax. I found this really helpful.

(‘Learn to Program‘ is another good basic introduction although you can’t run the code in browser.)

Secondly, I had a go at Advent of Code 2025 (coding puzzles) using Ruby – my attempts, still in progress on github. This was good to force me to use Ruby, although most of my brain power was consumed by the puzzles so I didn’t quite feel I was maximising my studying of Ruby!

Finally, for reference, the full language docs are here: https://docs.ruby-lang.org/en/3.4/ and a list of similarities and differences between Ruby and Python to get up to speed: https://www.ruby-lang.org/en/documentation/ruby-from-other-languages/to-ruby-from-python/