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)

Namespaces

In addition to adding methods to classes and providing out-of-the-box functionality as part of the module, another major purpose of modules is to provide a namespace. A namespace is just what it sounds like: it provides a scope or space for naming. In particular, it provides a space for constants. With the exception of raw global methods, the entry point for most code will be through a constant, whether it be a class constant or a module constant.

We've learned how to create classes and modules. Really, what we are doing is creating constants that point to those objects in memory. When we create constants (classes, modules, or otherwise) in IRB, we are creating a constant in the global namespace. This can quickly get crowded, especially if you are creating a class or module constant that may have a common name.

For instance, in the previous topic, we created an Enum module. Enum is a very common word in the Ruby world, and do we really think our Enum module...