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)

RubyGems and the require Method

Similar to the concept of including modules, Ruby has another way of including external code into your project, which is known as a gem. Essentially, a Ruby gem is a package of code that can be included in your project, much like a module, with a few key differences such as the ability to version a particular package and the ability to load other dependent gems at the same time.

Generally speaking, a gem is more of a collection of modules and classes than a single module or class. Gems can be tiny and can solve a single problem, such as formatting screen output, or they can be an entire application framework. The Ruby on Rails framework, for example, is a gem itself.

Most modern languages have an equivalent way of loading external code packages into an application. These are commonly referred to as package managers.

For Node.js, you would use npm or yarn; for Python, you would use PIP; for C#, you would use NuGet; and for Ruby, we use RubyGems...