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

Declaring classes in Ruby

Both PHP and Ruby are languages that use the Object-Oriented Programming (OOP) paradigm, Ruby by design and PHP by its own evolution. By now, serious developers should be very familiar with the paradigm. In PHP, all frameworks use OOP. While we are not going to go in depth into how this paradigm is implemented in Ruby, we will go through the basics of class syntax.

A class is basically an abstraction of a real-world entity. It is the blueprint of this abstraction. Let’s start by creating a simple class representing a person, some attributes for this person, and an action (or method) for them. Let’s create a file called class_syntax.rb with the following content:

class Person
end

This is as simple as it gets, but this by itself is not very useful. For this to be useful, we need to add attributes that represent the characteristics of a person. So, let’s add some attributes such as their first name and their last name. Our code will...