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)

Logging and Debugging

Logging and debugging are critical aspects of developing and deploying applications in any language. A good log file provides insights into exactly what an application is doing and when.

This is an invaluable resource when things go wrong in a production environment as it enables our applications to be "observed," with the log acting like an activity trace.

For example, when a production application goes down at 3 A.M. and you are responsible for investigating, you will be very happy when you find a nice informative log file waiting for you, as this will be the first place you check.

Effective logging has layers that can be controlled, which allows us to control the verbosity of the log output in order to debug an issue. The perfect logging system provides enough information to be useful, but not so much that it becomes noisy and difficult to read. This is often a hard balance to strike, and this is where "log levels" come into...