The document provides an overview of the Ruby programming language for Perl programmers. Some key points: - Ruby is an object-oriented scripting language that is interpreted, not compiled. It draws influences from Perl, Smalltalk, Lisp, and C. - Ruby supports features like classes, modules, blocks/iterators, exceptions, regular expressions and threads. Everything in Ruby is an object. - Compared to Perl, Ruby is more object-oriented, dynamic, and has built-in support for threads. Syntax also differs in some key ways. - The document provides examples of basic Ruby syntax like variables, loops, conditions, classes and modules to illustrate how the language works.