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 Splat Operator

Suppose you want a method to have arguments and you want to accept a varying number of them. Ruby has a special syntax to account for this case. It is called the splat operator and is denoted as *. Actually, this is called the single splat operator. Since Ruby 2.0, there is also a double splat operator, **. Let's take a look at both of these.

The Single Splat (*) Operator

The single splat operator, *, is actually a way to work with arrays. Remember from earlier that Ruby really implements arguments as arrays behind the scenes? The splat operator allows us to build arrays together into a single variable or to splat them out into multiple variables. One of the main uses of the splat operator is to use it as a catch-all method argument. In other words, you can pass multiple arguments to a method call, and if the method signature defines an argument with the splat operator, it will combine all those arguments into the one variable.

Consider the following...