Book Image

Comprehensive Ruby Programming

By : Jordan Hudgens
Book Image

Comprehensive Ruby Programming

By: Jordan Hudgens

Overview of this book

Ruby is a powerful, general-purpose programming language that can be applied to any task. Whether you are an experienced developer who wants to learn a new language or you are new to programming, this book is your comprehensive Ruby coding guide. Starting with the foundational principles, such as syntax, and scaling up to advanced topics such as big data analysis, this book will give you all of the tools you need to be a professional Ruby developer. A few of the key topics are: object-oriented programming, built-in Ruby methods, core programming skills, and an introduction to the Ruby on Rails and Sinatra web frameworks. You will also build 10 practical Ruby programs. Created by an experienced Ruby developer, this book has been written to ensure it focuses on the skills you will need to be a professional Ruby developer. After you have read this book, you will be ready to start building real-world Ruby projects.
Table of Contents (20 chapters)

Introduction to Ruby gems

In this chapter, we are going to talk about an exciting and important topic called Ruby gems. Gems are modules and classes that provide additional functionality to an application. Some gems provide so many features that individuals new to development may even think of them like some kind of programming magic. However, essentially, gems are nothing more than Ruby code files that perform certain tasks.

To give you an idea of how gems are used, I'm going to open Gemfile in a Rails project:

source 'https://rubygems.org'

gem 'rails', '~> 5.0', '>= 5.0.0.1'
gem 'pg', '~> 0.15'
gem 'sass-rails', '~> 5.0'
gem 'uglifier', '>= 1.3.0'
gem 'coffee-rails', '~> 4.1.0'
gem 'jquery-rails'
gem 'turbolinks'
gem &apos...