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 create a custom API connector in Ruby

In the How to use the httparty Ruby gem section, we walked through the httparty Ruby gem segment and we discussed how to integrate built-in classes from the gem to call an API. If you need something more specific, it's a good idea to create a separate class to manage the API processes. That's what we are going to do here while still leveraging some of the key modules supplied by HTTParty:

require 'rubygems'   
require 'httparty'

class StackExchange
include HTTParty
base_uri 'api.stackexchange.com'
end

In this code, we created a class called StackExchange. As the first step, we included the HTTParty module so that this class can access the methods provided by the gem. Next, we set base_uri, which is the Stack Exchange API URI's path.

Since this is a custom class, let's create an initializer...