Upside: Despite being the last in the list of language skill courses, the Codecademy "Learn Ruby" course does not assume the student knows anything about programming. It will start at the very beginning with variables, functions, flow control, etc.

Downside: If you already know basic programming concepts, the first few sections will be a complete bore as it teaches the concept of variables, function, flow control, etc. The only reason to put up with any of it is to learn the Ruby syntax for these basic concepts.

Fortunately, the class doesn't take terribly long before getting into the interesting stuff. Like how Ruby's basic data types have a lot more tools attached to them than other languages I've seen. All kinds of ways to traverse an array. The crazy number of things built in for various string manipulation. Things that, in other languages, a programmer would have to get from utility libraries outside of the language base.

That said, I'm not sure I see how these differences explain the enthusiasm I read from some Ruby champions. At the basic level covered in the Codecademy class, it doesn't seem significantly different from any of the other object-oriented programming languages out there. Yes, it has a lot of built-in capabilities for common operations, but is that really enough to get people excited?

I haven't seen the debugging facilities (or lack thereof) for Ruby. I'm also wary of the reputation Ruby has for being difficult to get up and running on a computer. Inside the Codecademy learning environment, it's already set up. Getting it up and running on your own has been repeatedly warned as a nontrivial process.

No matter, I wasn't learning Ruby for the sake of learning a new language. I was learning it as a foundation to build on learning a non-basic-library: Ruby on Rails.

That's next.