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 chapters, we learned how to debug Ruby programs using the logger class. In this chapter, we will learn about some of the advanced topics of the Ruby programming language, such as blocks, procs, and lambdas. By now, you must have realized that it's really easy to start writing Ruby code, create sample apps, and get instant gratification; however, every new Ruby developer (and sometimes the experienced ones too) will have a question buzzing in their mind about how it actually works.

We can safely call it the Ruby magic, and that's what we are planning to crack in this chapter. We are going to learn about advanced programming techniques that are present in other languages, but this time the Ruby-specific implementation is our focus. We will tear down the curtain from the syntactic sugar and take a look under the hood to reveal what metaprogramming is. Additionally, we will lay a strong foundation that will allow you to reuse these techniques and...