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

Versioning your shard

The first thing you need to do before you can deploy a project is create a new release. As you learned in Chapter 8, Using External Libraries, it is strongly suggested that all Crystal shards, especially libraries, follow semantic versioning (https://semver.org) to make dependencies more maintainable by allowing reproducible installs and an expectation of stability.

Because of this, any non-backward compatible change in the public API must result in a new major version of the shard. An example of this could be renaming a method, removing a method, altering the name of a method parameter, and so on. However, code can be deprecated as part of a minor release with the indication that it will be altered/removed in the next major version.

Crystal provides the https://crystal-lang.org/api/Deprecated.html annotation, which can be used to produce deprecation warnings when applied to methods or types. In some cases, a program may need to support multiple major versions...