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)

Duck Typing

Ruby is a dynamically typed language. Other languages are statically typed. The difference comes down to whether, and how, the language enforces the consistency of the type of variables. The consistency can be enforced (or not, as in Ruby) on the method arguments.

For example, a method can have a single argument, and there is nothing that restricts the code from calling that method and passing a variable of any data type. You can pass strings, arrays, and integers into any argument you want and Ruby will not complain. However, the method implementation may complain if you pass it a type that it cannot handle.

While this behavior leads to very flexible code, it can also lead to vulnerable code or code that needs to accommodate many different types. There is a split among developers, with some who prefer dynamically typed languages over statically typed languages.

As Ruby enthusiasts, we love dynamic typing because of its flexibility and expressiveness. In statically...