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)

Summary

In this chapter, we learned skills that are commonly used in real-world problems, such as metaprogramming, communicating with backend APIs, and creating reusable gems. No Ruby framework or open source library is complete without making use of a lot of metaprogramming. We learned various techniques as well as some of the in-built features of Ruby, including open class, method_missing, respond_to_missing?, monkey patching, and define_method. Next, we learned how to make HTTP requests to interact with external APIs over a network. Lastly, we learned how to package and distribute our reusable code by creating gems ourselves.

In the next chapter, we will learn about the most popular Ruby framework or, should we say, one of the world's most widely used server-side web application frameworks – Ruby on Rails.