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)

Introduction

In the previous chapter, we learned about extending the functionality of our application with gems, interacting with the filesystem with the File and IO classes, importing external data using CSV files, and how to wrap all this up in a nicely encapsulated service class.

Software bugs are a fact of life in software engineering. No matter your skill level, bugs always find a way to show up. We can, however, reduce the severity and volume of bugs by improving our knowledge of logging and debugging. A solid understanding of these topics will ensure that, when things go wrong, we're armed with the tools and required knowledge to solve the problem efficiently.

Understanding how and why issues occur is a critical part of software engineering. In this chapter, we're going to learn how to use a proper logging solution to gain visibility of our application's operation rather than just printing variables to the screen.

We'll also learn how to categorize...