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)

Using Gems in Your Code

To use a gem, you simply require the gem in your code, which is similar to how you would include a module. Consider the following example:

user = { name: 'John Smith', age: '35', address: { home: '1 kings cross road' }}
puts JSON.pretty_generate(user)
# NameError (uninitialized constant JSON)
require 'json'
puts JSON.pretty_generate(user)
{
  "name": "John Smith",
  "age": "35",
  "address": {
    "home": "1 kings cross road"
  }
}

In the preceding example, we create a simple hash containing some user information and we attempt to convert it to JSON and display it in a formatted way using the JSON.pretty_generate function.

We can then see that it throws a NameError error because the JSON gem has not been required and is, therefore, not available. This is very much like trying to use...