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

Explaining IO behavior

If you build and run the application as ./bin/transform ., it will just hang indefinitely. The reason for this is due to how most IO works in Crystal. The majority of IO is blocking by nature, meaning it will wait for data to come through the input IO type, in this case, STDIN. This can be best demonstrated with this simple program:

print "What is your name? "
 
if (name = gets).presence
  puts "Your name is: '#{name}'"
else
  puts "No name supplied"
end

The gets method is used to read a line in from STDIN and will wait until it either receives data or the user interrupts the command. This behavior is also true for non-terminal-based IO, such as HTTP response bodies. The reasoning and benefit of this behavior will be explained in the next chapter.