The Well-Grounded Rubyist

Summary

The Well-Grounded Rubyist, Second Edition addresses both newcomers to Ruby as well as Ruby programmers who want to deepen their understanding of the language. This beautifully written and totally revised second edition includes coverage of features that are new in Ruby 2.1, as well as expanded and updated coverage of aspects of the language that have changed.

Purchase of the print book includes a free eBook in PDF, Kindle, and ePub formats from Manning Publications.

About the Technology

This is a good time for Ruby! It's powerful like Java or C++, and has dynamic features that let your code react gracefully to changes at runtime. And it's elegant, so creating applications, development tools, and administrative scripts is easier and more straightforward. With the long-awaited Ruby 2, an active development community, and countless libraries and productivity tools, Ruby has come into its own.

About the Book

The Well-Grounded Rubyist, Second Edition is a beautifully written tutorial that begins with your first Ruby program and goes on to explore sophisticated topics like callable objects, reflection, and threading. The book concentrates on the language, preparing you to use Ruby in any way you choose. This second edition includes coverage of new Ruby features such as keyword arguments, lazy enumerators, and Module#prepend, along with updated information on new and changed core classes and methods.

What's Inside

• Clear explanations of Ruby concepts
• Numerous simple examples
• Updated for Ruby 2.1
• Prepares you to use Ruby anywhere for any purpose

About the Author

David A. Black is an internationally known Ruby developer, author, trainer, speaker, event organizer, and founder of Ruby Central, as well as a Lead Consultant at Cyrus Innovation.

Table of Contents

PART 1 RUBY FOUNDATIONS

1. Bootstrapping your Ruby literacy
2. Objects, methods, and local variables
3. Organizing objects with classes
4. Modules and program organization
5. The default object (self), scope, and visibility
6. Control-flow techniques

PART 2 BUILT-IN CLASSES AND MODULES

7. Built-in essentials
8. Strings, symbols, and other scalar objects
9. Collection and container objects
10. Collections central: Enumerable and Enumerator
11. Regular expressions and regexp-based string operations
12. File and I/O operations

PART 3 RUBY DYNAMICS

13. Object individuation
14. Callable and runnable objects
15. Callbacks, hooks, and runtime introspection