Jean Tessier’s Reviews > Eloquent Ruby, Second Edition > Status Update

Symbols, as opposed to strings. Strings represent data and have many methods for their manipulation and transformation. Symbols represent concepts and the only thing they really need is comparison. It makes no sense to take a substring of a symbol; that would be another, different symbol.

Regular expressions. I didn't know that ^ matches the beginning of any line in multiline strings (with the m suffix), and that $ matches the end of any line. I didn't know about the x suffix to insert spaces, newlines, and comments in regular expressions either.

Strings. The author recommends using double quotes most of the time. I have been using double quotes only when I need interpolation. Am I doing a bad?

Syntax is not enough. Language communities adopt a common style over time. Basic formatting has broad rules, with guidelines on when to break them.