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.

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Table of Contents (14 chapters)
Preface
Preface
About the Book
Free Chapter
1
1. Writing and Running Ruby Programs
1. Writing and Running Ruby Programs
Introduction
Interactive Ruby Shell (IRB)
Standard Data Types
Summary
2
2. Ruby Data Types and Operations
2. Ruby Data Types and Operations
Introduction
Arrays
Hashes
Ruby Methods
Summary
3
3. Program Flow
3. Program Flow
Introduction
Boolean Operators
Comparison
The Ternary Operator
Loops
Summary
4
Ruby Methods
Ruby Methods
Introduction
The Basic Structure of the Ruby Method
Return Values
The Splat Operator
Duck Typing
Sending a Message
Summary
5
5. Object-Oriented programming with Ruby
5. Object-Oriented programming with Ruby
Introduction
Classes and Objects
Getters and Setters
Inheritance
Encapsulation
Summary
6
6. Modules and Mixins
6. Modules and Mixins
Introduction
Including Modules
extend
Module Methods
Namespaces
prepend
Summary
7
7. Introduction to Ruby Gems
7. Introduction to Ruby Gems
Introduction
RubyGems and the require Method
Using Gems in Your Code
File I/O
Handling CSV Data
Writing Data
Service Objects
Summary
8
8. Debugging with Ruby
8. Debugging with Ruby
Introduction
Logging and Debugging
Basic Logging
Debugging
Summary
9
9. Ruby Beyond the Basics l
9. Ruby Beyond the Basics l
Introduction
Metaprogramming
Summary
10
10. Ruby Beyond the Basics ll
10. Ruby Beyond the Basics ll
Introduction
Metaprogramming – A Deep Dive
HTTP Requests
Creating a Ruby Gem
Summary
11
11. Introduction to Ruby on Rails l
11. Introduction to Ruby on Rails l
Introduction
Generating Our First Rails App
Anatomy of a Rails application
Models, Migrations, and Databases
The Rails Console
Summary
12
12. Introduction to Ruby on Rails ll
12. Introduction to Ruby on Rails ll
Introduction
Associations
Validations
Summary
Appendix
Appendix
1. Writing and Running Ruby Programs
2. Ruby Data Types and Operations
3. Program Flow
4. Ruby Methods
5. Object-Oriented Programming with Ruby
6. Modules and Mixins
7. Introduction to Ruby Gems
8. Debugging with Ruby
9. Ruby Beyond the Basics I
10. Ruby Beyond the Basics II
11. Introduction to Ruby on Rails I
12. Introduction to Ruby on Rails II

The Basic Structure of the Ruby Method

As we have seen, the basic structure of a method is as follows:

def echo(var)
  puts var
end

We are defining a method named echo that accepts the var variable as a parameter or argument. The end keyword marks the end of the block of code. The code between the def and end statements is known as the method body or the method implementation.

Methods are always called on an object. In Ruby, a method is called a message, and the object is called the receiver. The online Ruby documentation uses this language specifically, so it is good to get used to this vocabulary.

In the previous example, however, it doesn't seem like there is an object. Let's investigate this through IRB:

def echo(var)
  puts var
end
=> :echo
echo "helloooo!"
helloooo!
=> nil
self
=> main
self.class
=> Object

Here, we've defined and called our echo method in IRB. We use the self keyword, which is a reference...

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