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)

Metaprogramming – A Deep Dive

We introduced metaprogramming in the previous chapter and defined it as code that generates code. Ruby has numerous powerful methods that make it possible to allow code that writes code. Furthermore, metaprogramming is most often used to create flexible interfaces. This is especially useful when you create Ruby gems that are pluggable Ruby libraries in other Ruby programs. Metaprogramming is also used in creating Ruby-based frameworks, such as Sinatra, Ruby on Rails, or when you create your own framework. Ruby on Rails, the most popular Ruby framework, is loaded with metaprogramming magic.

In the previous chapter, we stated that metaprogramming makes use of multiple elements available within the Ruby language. We discussed three such elements: blocks, procs, and lambdas. In this section, we will take a practical approach in order to understand metaprogramming and discuss topics such as opening classes in Ruby, monkey patching, and some in-built...