Book Image

The Ruby Workshop

By : Akshat Paul, Peter Philips, Dániel Szabó, Cheyne Wallace
Book Image

The Ruby Workshop

By: Akshat Paul, Peter Philips, Dániel Szabó, Cheyne Wallace

Overview of this book

The beauty of Ruby is its readability and expressiveness. Ruby hides away a lot of the complexity of programming, allowing you to work quickly and 'do more' with fewer lines of code. This makes it a great programming language for beginners, but learning any new skill can still be a daunting task. If you want to learn to code using Ruby, but don't know where to start, The Ruby Workshop will help you cut through the noise and make sense of this fun, flexible language. You'll start by writing and running simple code snippets and Ruby source code files. After learning about strings, numbers, and booleans, you'll see how to store collections of objects with arrays and hashes. You'll then learn how to control the flow of a Ruby program using boolean logic. The book then delves into OOP and explains inheritance, encapsulation, and polymorphism. Gradually, you'll build your knowledge of advanced concepts by learning how to interact with external APIs, before finally exploring the most popular Ruby framework ? Ruby on Rails ? and using it for web development. Throughout this book, you'll work on a series of realistic projects, including simple games, a voting application, and an online blog. By the end of this Ruby book, you'll have the knowledge, skills and confidence to creatively tackle your own ambitious projects with Ruby.
Table of Contents (14 chapters)

Introduction

In the previous chapter, we learned about a number of advanced topics, including blocks, procs, and lambdas, which we will use in this chapter when we dive deep into the world of metaprogramming. We will also learn when we should not apply metaprogramming concepts by not always crossing the line into monkey patching (which is changing the behavior of classes and ultimately making the code confusing and unmaintainable).

In the second part of this chapter, we will learn a key programming skill that is required in order to create any real-world application that is communicating with external APIs: how to make GET data from a backend server and how to submit data to said server.

The final part of this chapter will help you share and distribute your Ruby code with others. So far, you have learned how to use Ruby gems, but, by the end of this chapter, you will be able to create your own RubyGem package and share it with the world.