Book Image

From PHP to Ruby on Rails

By : Bernard Pineda
4 (1)
Book Image

From PHP to Ruby on Rails

4 (1)
By: Bernard Pineda

Overview of this book

Are you a PHP developer looking to take your first steps into the world of Ruby development? From PHP to Ruby on Rails will help you leverage your existing knowledge to gain expertise in Ruby on Rails. With a focus on bridging the gap between PHP and Ruby, this guide will help you develop the Ruby mindset, set up your local environment, grasp the syntax, master scripting, explore popular Ruby frameworks, and find out about libraries and gems. This book offers a unique take on Ruby from the perspective of a seasoned PHP developer who initially refused to learn other technologies, but never looked back after taking the leap. As such, it teaches with a language-agnostic approach that will help you feel at home in any programming language without learning everything from scratch. This approach will help you avoid common mistakes such as writing Ruby as if it were PHP and increase your understanding of the programming ecosystem as a whole. By the end of this book, you'll have gained a solid understanding of Ruby, its ecosystem, and how it compares to PHP, enabling you to build robust and scalable applications using Ruby on Rails.
Table of Contents (15 chapters)
1
Part 1:From PHP to Ruby Basics
8
Part 2:Ruby and the Web

Exploring types of variables

Variables in Ruby have the same utility as in other programming languages: they are mutable containers for values. Simply put, variables are used to save values for later usage. These values may change over time, or even change the type of data they contain.

Just like with PHP, Ruby is dynamically typed (or duck typing), which means that the interpreter infers what type of data we are handling at runtime. We don’t need to tell Ruby or PHP that a variable is either a string, a number, or a Boolean. One difference with PHP, however, is that in later versions of PHP, you can specify what type of data to use, especially in object-oriented PHP. However, even with this “enhancement,” the majority of the language remains duck-typed.

How does this affect us as developers? Well, let’s take a look at a simple example. First, open an IRS. Type the following command:

irb

As we saw previously, once we type this command, the shell...