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 about program flow. Program flow is a foundational concept in programming that allows programmers to change execution paths dynamically depending on any number of conditions. A core concept within program flow is understanding the Boolean data type along with its truthy operators, AND (&&) and OR (||).

We learned that Ruby supports different program flow options, such as if and unless, which are logical inverses of each other. The decision to use one or the other depends on the programmer, who should opt for readability and maintainability.

We also learned how to loop and were introduced to Ruby blocks, which are bundles of code that get executed along with each iteration of a loop. Bundling code into reusable chunks is also a foundational concept. Another way to bundle code is by using methods, which we've looked at only briefly so far. In the next chapter, we will go into greater depth about methods by learning how to define...