His latest venture, Famous.ai, may be the most ambitious yet: a platform that allows users to describe their app idea in plain English and generate a working application—no coding required.

Microsoft has hired John Lam, the software developer behind RubyCLR, open-source software for writing .Net applications with the Ruby programming language. In his blog, Lam said that he will be ...

Programming Ruby, 2nd Ed. goes farther afield in its 800+ pages, but has less material on the language itself and more material on ancillary matters.