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)

The Ternary Operator

Ternary means composed of three parts. In Ruby (and also in other programming languages), there is a common programming idiom called the ternary operator, which allows a quick if/else conditional to be put on one line by breaking it into three parts:

user_input = 'password'
secret = 'password'
user_has_access = user_input == secret ? true : false 

The three parts are the condition (user_input == secret), the statement if true (true), and the statement if false (false). The three parts are separated first by a ? and secondly by a : notation.

While Ruby doesn't always require syntax such as parentheses, the preceding statement may be a bit hard to read unless you are very familiar with how Ruby handles the order of operations. Here is a clearer way of writing the preceding code:

user_has_access = (user_input == secret) ? true : false

The ternary operator is great for quick one-liners. However, if lots of complex logic is starting...