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I’ve implemented ruby bindings for the three major geocoding APIs as gems:

And as a bonus, you get a Yahoo! search gem to search either the web or for locations, yahoo-search.

The bindings all have similar APIs, but return different objects depending upon what information the API reliably provides. Yahoo! gives the most information, followed by Google, followed by geocoder.us.

Yahoo!

documentation

require 'rubygems'
require 'yahoo/geocode'

yg = Yahoo::Geocode.new application_id
locations = yg.locate '701 First Street, Sunnyvale, CA'
p location.first.coordinates

(and searching for locations)

documentation

require 'rubygems'
require 'yahoo/local_search'

yls = Yahoo::LocalSearch.new application_id
results, = yls.locate 'pizza', 94306, 2
results.each do |location|
  puts "#{location.title} at #{location.address}, #{location.city}" 
end

Google

documentation

require 'rubygems'
require 'google_geocode'

gg = GoogleGeocode.new application_id
location = gg.locate '1600 Amphitheater Pkwy, Mountain View, CA'
p location.coordinates

geocoder.us

documentation

require 'rubygems'
require 'geocoder_us'

gu = GeocoderUs.new 'username', 'password'
p gu.locate('1924 E Denny Way, Seattle, WA')