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

Structured concurrency

Concurrency is the act of having many computations that are going on at the same time. Different languages deal with this concept differently. For example, Erlang has actors, JavaScript has promises, .NET has tasks, and Go has goroutines. Each of these provides a different abstraction on how to understand and handle the ongoing jobs and communicate data between them.

Crystal provides some low-level concurrency primitives with fibers, channels, and the select statement. They are quite powerful and allow a program to handle concurrency as it sees fit. But the standard library still lacks a higher-level tool for structured concurrency, where the lifetime and data flow of each job is clearly stated and predictable. Having this will make concurrent programming less error-prone and easier to reason about. More about this can be found by reading up on issue #6468.