Book Image

Crystal Programming

By : George Dietrich, Guilherme Bernal
Book Image

Crystal Programming

By: George Dietrich, Guilherme Bernal

Overview of this book

Crystal is a programming language with a concise and user-friendly syntax, along with a seamless system and a performant core, reaching C-like speed. This book will help you gain a deep understanding of the fundamental concepts of Crystal and show you how to apply them to create various types of applications. This book comes packed with step-by-step explanations of essential concepts and practical examples. You'll learn how to use Crystal’s features to create complex and organized projects relying on OOP and its most common design patterns. As you progress, you'll gain a solid understanding of both the basic and advanced features of Crystal. This will enable you to build any application, including command-line interface (CLI) programs and web applications using IOs, concurrency and C bindings, HTTP servers, and the JSON API. By the end of this programming book, you’ll be equipped with the skills you need to use Crystal programming for building and understanding any application you come across.
Table of Contents (26 chapters)
1
Part 1: Getting Started
5
Part 2: Learning by Doing – CLI
10
Part 3: Learn by Doing – Web Application
13
Part 4: Metaprogramming
18
Part 5: Supporting Tools

Chapter 11: Introducing Annotations

As mentioned in the previous chapter, macros can be a powerful tool for generating code in order to reduce duplication and keep your application DRY. However, one of the limitations of macros, especially those outsides of a macro definition, is that it is challenging to access data to use within the macro since it must be accessible at compile time, like an environmental variable or constant.

Neither of these are great options most of the time. In order to better solve this, we need to explore the next Crystal metaprogramming concept: annotations.

We will cover the following topics in this chapter:

  • What are annotations?
  • Storing data within annotations
  • Reading annotations

By the end of this chapter, you should have a solid understanding of what annotations are and how to use them.