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 took a journey into data types and some very common operations that can be performed on them. We started out with array operations and took a closer look at adding, removing, and iterating over this data type. Then, we moved on to the hash data type and discovered the hidden magic that powers most of the web and desktop applications written in Ruby. Hashes are a very common way to store and manipulate data inside web applications. We added, removed, and iterated over hashes, and then performed some symbol-based sorting with nested hashes. Our final destination in this chapter was the methods and functions that allow us to create either functional or procedural applications in Ruby. Functions and methods in themselves are not of much use, so we imbued them with arguments. We also took a closer look at how optional and default arguments are handled in case multiple arguments are passed. This constituted a very important chapter, namely, how the extra arguments...