Ruby is an open source programming language, which means that it's free to use, and it was developed by a large community of developers.
So what can you do with Ruby? By leveraging the Ruby programming language you can build many different types of applications. If you're interested in building dynamic web applications you will most likely want to learn the Ruby on Rails web framework. Since Rails is built on top of Ruby, it's beneficial to understand how to program in Ruby before you can use Rails properly.