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

Summary

Now you can use functions to make code more succinct and readable. We explored the different function forms that exist (does, has, func, and function), and the awesome power of do for evaluating and importing code. We learned to declare function arguments, refinements, and return values, giving them a type when appropriate. Functions should be documented, and we saw how to do this. We also explored some important techniques for performing error handling and writing recursive functions. Finally, we demonstrated how code in Red can be treated as data, making metaprogramming possible.

We also learned how to make objects with fields and methods, as well as how to make new objects from existing objects and how to explore the contents of an object.

In the next chapter, you'll learn how to read and store data in files, making a whole lot of new applications possible.

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