The Well-Grounded Rubyist

Book excerpt: Summary The Well-Grounded Rubyist, Third Edition is a beautifully written tutorial that begins with your first Ruby program and takes you all the way to sophisticated topics like reflection, threading, and recursion. Ruby masters David A. Black and Joe Leo distill their years of knowledge for you, concentrating on the language and its uses so you can use Ruby in any way you choose. Updated for Ruby 2.5. Purchase of the print book includes a free eBook in PDF, Kindle, and ePub formats from Manning Publications. About the Technology Designed for developer productivity, Ruby is an easy-to-learn dynamic language perfect for creating virtually any kind of software. Its famously friendly development community, countless libraries, and amazing tools, like the Rails framework, have established it as the language of choice for high-profile companies, including GitHub, SlideShare, and Shopify. The future is bright for the well-grounded Rubyist! About the Book In The Well-Grounded Rubyist, Third Edition, expert authors David A. Black and Joseph Leo deliver Ruby mastery in an easy-to-read, casual style. You'll lock in core principles as you write your first Ruby programs. Then, you'll progressively build up to topics like reflection, threading, and recursion, cementing your knowledge with high-value exercises to practice your skills along the way. What's Inside Basic Ruby syntax Running Ruby extensions FP concepts like currying, side-effect-free code, and recursion Ruby 2.5 updates About the Reader For readers with beginner-level programming skills. About the Authors David A. Black is an internationally known Ruby developer and author, and a cofounder of Ruby Central. Ruby teacher and advocate Joseph Leo III is the founder of Def Method and lead organizer of the Gotham Ruby Conference. Table of Contents PART 1 RUBY FOUNDATIONS Bootstrapping your Ruby literacy Objects, methods, and local variables Organizing objects with classes Modules and program organization The default object (self), scope, and visibility Control-flow techniques PART 2 BUILT-IN CLASSES AND MODULES Built-in essentials Strings, symbols, and other scalar objects Collection and container objects Collections central: Enumerable and Enumerator Regular expressions and regexp-based string operations File and I/O operations PART 3 RUBY DYNAMICS Object individuation Callable and runnable objects Callbacks, hooks, and runtime introspection Ruby and functional programming