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 studied the concept of arrays and hashes in Ruby. We also looked at different methods applied to arrays and hashes. In this chapter, we will be looking at how programs in Ruby are designed and used in applications.

Useful software programs are not simply a linear set of instructions; they make decisions about what code to run at any given time based on a set of conditions or criteria. Different programming languages have different types of program flow options. Two of the most common types of program flow options are conditionals and loops, which we will cover in this chapter.

Conditionals, also known as branches, are like a fork in the road. Do you turn left, or do you turn right? In the case of programming, for instance, you can decide what to do if a variable equals a value or is less than or greater than a certain value. Software simplifies the problem and makes the decision simply about truthiness: whether a condition is satisfied...