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 to use the httparty Ruby gem

In the last section, How to work with APIs in Ruby, we built a class to call an external API. In this section, we are going to walk through some shortcuts for using the httparty Ruby gem and working with the Stack Overflow API.

Let's start by creating a variable called response and pass a URL to the get method of HTTParty:

require 'rubygems'
require 'httparty'
response = HTTParty.get('http://api.stackexchange.com/2.2/questions?site=stackoverflow')

Now we'll see the different features provided by the built-in HTTParty method.

First, there is the body method that can be called with this code:

response.body

This will give the following output:

This is the body of all the items available in the Stack Exchange API that we accessed through the get method of HTTParty. You can see different attributes on every page...