When is no Perl 6, we can try Ruby

You know perl, all the funny $_ / $& / q{} vars/ops, inline regexps but want to use object-oriented syntax with more typical dot, my_object.my_sub("blabla")?

There is Ruby, now probably more known as a one of dependency needed to fire up Rails MVC framework ;)

Start from here
http://www.ruby-lang.org/en/documentation/ruby-from-other-languages/to-ruby-from-perl/

look for some code examples
http://migo.sixbit.org/papers/Introduction_to_Ruby/slide-index.html

and of course compare solutions in Ruby/Perl from mythical Perl Cookbook, done by PLEAC folks,
http://pleac.sourceforge.net/

For me Ruby is too perlish - after years of perl programming I fill better when I can do something in more clean Python syntax, with TIOOWTDI. However it's nice to see that Ruby is so close to Perl and there are some hacks you can do in Perl, Ruby but not in Python.