from ch. 1 (introduction):
Ruby comes out of the Perl tradition,
and Yukihito “Matz” Matsumoto, the creator of Ruby,
calls it “a better Perl than Perl”.
In our experience, most programmers with exposure to both languages agree.
We’d add that, for web programming, embedded Ruby (ERb) is a better PHP than PHP.
Actually although I (Jochen Hayek) was never terribly unsatisfied with PERL
(although I started a Python/IMAP project during my best PERL times,
because Python then quite intrigued me,
just as Ruby intrigues me now),
I also like Ruby better than PERL.
But one of PERL’s big advantages is CPAN.
I hope, Ruby’s repositories can compare to that.
So far I am not quite convinced of that,
but I am still quite willing to go for Ruby and Rails now.
It can’t be such a big mistake.