One of the most exciting aspects of Ruby is the overwhelming number of open source projects that have been contributed by the community for all of us to enjoy. As of January, 2008 Rubyforge sports over 2500 projects with over 19 million gem downloads. And that's just gems. It doesn't account for the millions of checkouts from source control as developers contribute back to other projects and install plugins into their own applications.

In this session we're going to take a look under the hood of a few of these Ruby libraries. We'll crack them open and see what it is that makes them tick. By the end of the session you should have a basic understanding of why gems are so much fun to write; why they are so easy to share; and how they exploit the Ruby language to make the lives of other developers easier and more enjoyable.