Hallo everybody. I discovered the Ruby Q. site some time ago and I’ve
been much intrigued by the Ruby language. So I’ve begun trying to solve
some of the old problems, and I’m very interested in learning Ruby to
finally resume work on my many old hobby projects that lie unfinished
since when I stopped using Pascal and then never managed to use C++ for
anything that I didn’t REALLY HAVE to do 
As an hobbyist programmer, I am an orphan of the good old Borland Turbo
Pascal 7 I remember well how I learnt to use it mostly from the
online help (!) many years ago, in school. The thing I most liked about
it was the tight integration of every part (editor, compiler, debugger)
and the well-organized default libraries: I put “uses crt” at the
beginning and had my console/speaker functions, “uses graph” and I had
my graphics primitives, etc… Pretty rudimental things for today’s
standards, yeah, but I never found something that usable anymore. And
I’m talking about a 16-bit DOS application… ^___^
So, I’d like to know if someone put together a well-documented
“compilation” of basic libraries for 2D graphics, simple windowing,
audio, and inline C functions. Nothing too fancy: the easier the better,
since I have to worry first and foremost about learning Ruby for now. I
like to spend time writing clever algorithms (well, as clever as I
manage to be ;), much less managing interfaces. Also, I don’t like to be
forced to read dozens of specifications to choose a couple of libraries
for a 300-line program: i’ll do that if and when programming becomes my
main job 
I’ve googled far and wide and found many interesting projects that may
wery well be worth a try, but I would like to know well my “base
architecture” while I learn, and not overwhelm myself with details
already. For the same reason I’d like to use only stable and
well-documented libraries (eg. the “shoes” project that has been
advertised yesterday seems very much like what I need for graphics, but
alphas are for people who KNOW what they are doing, right?)
I’ve seen that many efforts have been done in this sense regarding
Rails, but I’m not interested in web development (yet so they aren’t
quite what I need. Quite the opposite, I’d like to dabble with hardware
a bit, e.g. writing a control application for a small microcontroller
device that needs to communicate via serial port.
Thanks in advance for any response 