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

Windows

Crystal supports Linux, macOS, and FreeBSD, but it cannot run natively on Windows today. All other platforms are Unix-like and are reasonably similar. On the other hand, Windows is an entirely different thing and requires considerable effort to be correctly supported. This is one of the most requested features, and work has been underway to provide proper Windows support. Running Crystal inside Windows Subsystem for Linux (WSL) is supported, but this is mostly intended for developers.

Crystal 1.0.0 was released with very early support to get simple programs compiled to Windows, but this doesn't mean you can already use it for everything: concurrent I/O features (files, sockets, console, and so on), for example, are still missing. Fortunately, implementations for each of those primitives are being contributed by the community and should be available on one of the following 1.x versions.

You can check the current progress on GitHub issue #5430. If this issue is already...