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

Supporting terminal input/output

In the previous chapter, we left off with our Processor type having a def process(input : String) : String method that handles transforming the input string, processing it via jq, and then transforming and returning the output data. We then call this method with static input. However, a CLI application is not very useful if it needs to be recompiled every time you want to change the input data.

The more proper way to handle this is by leveraging terminal-based IO, namely, Standard In (STDIN), Standard Out (STDOUT), and Standard Error (STDERR). These will allow us to consume data, output data, and output errors, respectively. In fact, you have already been using STDOUT without even knowing it! The Crystal method puts writes the content passed to it to STDOUT, followed by a newline. STDOUT's type inherits from the abstract IO type, which also defines a puts method on the IO instance. Basically, this allows you to do the same thing as the top-level...