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)

HTTP Requests

HTTP (Hypertext Transfer Protocol) is used to make requests and receive responses over the internet. HTTP helps in transferring data from one point to another over a network.

Such requests are most common when you interact with an external server, or APIs, to receive data or submit data to them. Essentially, no real-world applications are possible without making HTTP requests The most common way of organizing APIs is to use the constraints set by REST. REST (REpresentational State Transfer) is an architectural type that has prescribed standards for various systems to communicate with one another. These APIs are characterized by the separation of concerns between client and server (for example, if we make a Ruby program that interacts with an API, our program with the client and API to which the request is made will be the server).

For now, we will not go into detail about REST, but we will learn how to use it and how easy it makes it to interact with backend APIs...