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)

Handling CSV Data

CSV is a very common format for representing tabular data. It is an easily parsable data format to work with and it can be opened in all common spreadsheet applications, such as Microsoft Office and Google Docs, with no need for conversion.

We can represent columns and rows with CSV, much like a relational database or a spreadsheet, which makes it a very handy tool for processing exported database records, generating data to be imported into a database, or creating spreadsheets.

Ruby comes with a full library for handling CSV data out of the box. The Ruby CSV library is actually a gem and is part of the Ruby default gem set. This means that to use the CSV library in your code, you simply need to "require" it.

We can see the csv gem with the following gem list command:

$ gem list | grep csv
csv (default: 1.0.0)

Ruby has even published this gem publicly on GitHub (https://packt.live/35qKCUf), just like any other gem.

All modern versions of...