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)

Loops

Loops are a type of program flow that repeat blocks of code. The ability to repeat a block of code allows us to do things such as processing collections of data. Typically, loops will run until a condition is satisfied. For instance, a loop may be run until it has run a certain number of times, or a loop may be run until it has processed all the items in a collection of data. Let's look at the following types of loops in Ruby:

  • while/do loops
  • until/do loops
  • do/while loops

The while/do Loop

Another foundational concept for program flow is being able to repeat sections of code until a condition is met. These are called loops and in Ruby there are many ways to create loops. The most basic structure of a loop contains two things:

  • The condition that will be evaluated to determine whether to repeat the code
  • The block of code to be repeated

Here is a simple block using the while keyword:

while true do
  puts Time.now
end...