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

Reading and writing data files

The read and write words are good examples of the generalized way in which Red words work. They are used to read and write all sorts of files (text and binary data), but you can also use them with network ports or URLs (see the stock quotes example later in this chapter). If you have worked with files in other languages, you'll appreciate their ease of use; in Red, there is no need to open a file in a certain mode and close it afterwards!

Let's work with the exact same data from our contacts series example in Chapter 5, Working with Series and Blocks:

;-- see Chapter07/reading-and-writing-files.red:
contacts: [
"John Smith" "123 Tomline Lane Forest Hills, NJ" "555-1234"
"Paul Thompson" "234 Georgetown Pl. Grove, AL" "555-2345"
"Jim Persee" "345 Pickles...