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)

Utilizing metaprogramming with method_missing to create methods on the fly

This will be an interesting section. You are going to learn how to create code that will write code inside a Ruby program by leveraging the metaprogramming construct of method_missing. Though it's an advanced Ruby concept, it's fun to learn and I think it'll be handy for you. So let's get started.

Imagine we have a database called Author, and, in it, we have different attributes, such as first_name, last_name, and genre. What do we do if we want to create dynamic methods on the fly? For example, if we create a new author in the database, we want custom methods to print out each of the attributes. At the same time, we don't want to hardcode a bunch of methods; we want them to get generated dynamically. Essentially, we want a metaprogramming method that will write code dynamically...