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)

Summary

In this chapter, we've covered how to import and export raw CSV data in our application, how to extend the functionality of our applications by including external libraries with Ruby gems, and how to interact with the filesystem using Ruby.

These are powerful tools that can turn our applications from toys into real services with just a few simple lines of code. With these new tools, we can import data from databases, spreadsheets, or any number of other sources and process them programmatically with Ruby in any way we want; the options are endless.

We've also learned some best practices regarding how to structure code that doesn't necessarily fit within our domain models by refactoring them into service objects, keeping our models lean and clean. Your coworkers will thank you for this one, trust me.

An application is only as good as its input and output. We've now learned a few methods by which we can increase how much we input by importing external...