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)

How Rails use metaprogramming for the find_by method

So far, we have seen:

  • A basic overview of metaprogramming
  • How we can use it in a custom class
  • How to use it on existing Ruby classes, such as the String class

In this section, we are going to see how metaprogramming can be used in real-world applications.

I'm going to open up a Ruby on Rails application because Rails leverages metaprogramming as well as any program I've ever seen. We're going to walk through how the Rails framework generates database lookup methods on the fly.

Here is the database schema file for the Rails application we're going to look at:

create_table "contacts", force: true do |t|
t.string "name"
t.string "email"
t.text "message"
t.string "category"
t.datetime "created_at"
t.datetime "updated_at"
end...