Ruby has gained a large mind share in the "agile language" arena in the last four years. There are testimonies of it being successfully used in scientific applications, network monitoring, simulations and visualization, point-of-sales systems, robotics, games programming, telephony, code-generation and much more. Of late, it is also gaining popularity as "the language" for Web development. We at Artima.com are convinced that the time is ripe for launching a zine focused on developments in the Ruby world. Introducing: Ruby Code & Style.

Ruby Code & Style is a peer-reviewed, online journal for the Ruby community. We will focus on bringing a steady stream of high quality articles written by Rubyists all over the world which will showcase the strengths of this language and the ingenuity of its users in solving some real-life non-trivial problems. We will strive to maintain the worthiness of material assuring our readers a good read every single time. We will achieve that by way of the review process enforced by our star-studded cast of Advisory board. It includes, along with the creator of Ruby, Yukihiro Matsumoto (a.k.a Matz), eminent personalities in the Ruby community.

Timeliness and relevance to the current state of Ruby's evolution is the currency by which we'll measure the value of material submitted for publication in our magazine. We will do our best to keep the articles valuable in terms of this currency by carefully choosing topics which are attracting the attention of the software developers, architects, integrators, managers covering all aspects of Information Technology. Although the zine is slanted towards intermediate to advanced Ruby programmers, we will welcome tutorials which help Rubyists to get started in a specific domain of software development. Our emphasis will be on code supplemented, in-depth articles revealing various facets of Ruby. But we will not be limited by that. We also likely publish interviews, philosophical essays, quizzes, and translations (especially from our Japanese counterparts). We may also publish book-reviews, so long as they are related to Ruby and are relevant to our target audience: the informed Rubyist.

It will be our endeavor to bring the brightest and the best gems out. We welcome you, our audience, to join us on this endeavor and also contribute by writing for Ruby Code & Style you so desire.

James Britt (http://www.jamesbritt.com) is a Ruby developer living in Scottsdale, AZ. Among his other tasks, he runs ruby-doc.org and rubyxml.com, and has been active in the Ruby community since 2001. He has presented at Ruby conferences in both the US and Europe, and is the author of several articles about Ruby.

Shashank Daté has been using Ruby for over three years both professionally and for hobby projects. He has presented at the International Ruby Conference 2003 and at local users groups. He founded the Kansas City Ruby Users Group and has been organizing presentations for this group for the last two years. He has contributed and authored multiple projects on the Rubyforge and is an active member of the Ruby community.