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

By now, you should have a running development environment and be able to work with the Red console. You have also learned how to compile and execute a simple script, in development mode as well as in release mode. You learned the most important compilation options, such as renaming the output file with -o, or cross-compiling your program to another deployment platform with -t. You also gained some insight into Red’s compilation model. Finally, we reviewed the existing editor options and prepared a comfortable environment to start coding, working interactively with the Red console as well as with source files.

In the following chapter, we'll explore the basic building blocks of a Red program—words, values, and their types.