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)

Metaprogramming

You might be wondering what metaprogramming actually is. Well, it is utilized by most programming languages. Technically, it's a piece of code that writes code by itself dynamically. With metaprogramming, you can create methods and classes at runtime. It allows you to reopen or even modify classes, as well as add methods to classes on the fly. It helps to maintain the Don't Repeat Yourself (DRY) principle in programming; however, it is a hard concept to grasp and get right.

Let's imagine the scenario of a chef in a restaurant. This chef needs to know many recipes and be able to put together food for their customers. Each food item requires different steps for preparation. There are some steps that need to be done before, during, and after the food is prepared. In order to create a simulation for these steps to be performed by an automated system, you might consider using the metaprogramming feature provided by the Ruby language.

Metaprogramming...