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

Generic classes

A generic class (or struct) is constructed on top of one or more unknown types that are only determined later when you're creating an instance of said class. This sounds complex, but you have already used some generic classes before. Array is the most common one: have you noticed that we always need to specify the type of data the array holds? It isn't enough to say that a given variable is an array – we must say it is an array of strings, or Array(String). The Hash generic class is similar, but this one has two type parameters – the types of the keys and the types of the values.

Let's look at a simple example. Say you want to create a class that holds a value in one of its instance variables, but the value can be of any type. Let's look at a way we can do this:

class Holder(T)
  def initialize(@value : T)
  end
  def get
    @value
  end
  def set(new_value...