Book Image

Learn Red ? Fundamentals of Red

By : Ivo Balbaert
Book Image

Learn Red ? Fundamentals of Red

By: Ivo Balbaert

Overview of this book

A key problem of software development today is software bloat, where huge toolchains and development environments are needed in software coding and deployment. Red significantly reduces this bloat by offering a minimalist but complete toolchain. This is the first introductory book about it, and it will get you up and running with Red as quickly as possible. This book shows you how to write effective functions, reduce code redundancies, and improve code reuse. It will be helpful for new programmers who are starting out with Red to explore its wide and ever-growing package ecosystem and also for experienced developers who want to add Red to their skill set. The book presents the fundamentals of programming in Red and in-depth informative examples using a step-by-step approach. You will be taken through concepts and examples such as doing simple metaprogramming, functions, collections, GUI applications, and more. By the end of the book, you will be fully equipped to start your own projects in Red.
Table of Contents (13 chapters)
11
Assessments

Working with Series and Blocks

As you know by now, nearly everything in Red gets written inside [ ]. These denote blocks, which are a kind of series. Blocks and series form the foundation of Red code; in fact, if you look at the type hierarchy in Chapter 3, Using Words, Values, and Types, a block is also a series! type. A series! type contains a lot of other common types besides blocks, such as strings, files, binary values, tags, emails, images, and so on. That's why the functions and actions that work with block series can be applied to other types of values. For example, strings are essentially series of characters, and so the techniques used to manipulate block series can also be used for string operations.

In this chapter, we will learn how to work with series. We'll learn how to view a series as something that has a head and a tail, and a moving index. We&apos...