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

Structuring an interface

View, the graphical interface engine, is completely written in Red and Red/System. The following diagram shows how View is structured with the help of three other parts in a bit more detail:

  • VID: The Visual Interface Dialect
  • Draw: The dialect to draw two-dimensional shapes
  • React: This is an engine that makes the whole system automatically and fully reactive to the user or system events

You can check their relationship in the following screenshot:

The VID dialect contains a lot of words, and we'll cover them systematically so that you don't get bewildered. In this section, we'll talk about the basic window, container, and layout settings. But to get you started with some fundamentals, we'll build a screen interface for the Downloading currency and exchange rates script that we made in Chapter 7, Working with Files.

...