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You don’t have to know everything about a car to drive one, and you don’t need to know everything about Ruby to start programming with it. Written for both experienced and new programmers alike, Learning Ruby is a just-get-in-and-drive book—a hands-on tutorial that offers lots of Ruby programs and explains how and why they work, just enough to get you rolling down the road.
Interest in Ruby stems from the popularity of Rails, the web development framework that’s attracting new devotees and refugees from Java and PHP. But there are plenty of other uses for this versatile language. The best way to learn is to just try the code! You’ll find examples on nearly every page of this book that you can imitate and hack.
Briefly, this book:
Outlines the most important features of Ruby
Demonstrates how to use conditionals and how to manipulate strings in Ruby
Covers regular expressions
Describes how to use operators, basic math, functions from the Math module, rational numbers, and more
Guides you through Ruby arrays and demonstrates hashes in detail
Explains how to process files with Ruby
Discusses Ruby classes and modules (mixins) in detail, including a brief introduction to object-oriented programming (OOP)
Introduces processing XML, the Tk toolkit, RubyGems, reflection, RDoc, embedded Ruby, metaprogramming, exception handling, and other topics
Acquaints you with some of the essentials of Rails and includes a short Rails tutorial
Each chapter concludes with a set of review questions, and appendixes provide a glossary of terms related to Ruby programming, plus reference material from the book in one convenient location. If you want to take Ruby out for a drive, Learning Ruby holds the keys.
Michael Fitzgerald has more than 20 years of experience as a writer and programmer and describes Ruby as his “favorite language so far.” Michael is also the author of Learning XSLT, XML Hacks, and Ruby Pocket Reference, and coauthor of XML Pocket Reference, all published by O’Reil ISBN 9788184043341
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Pages : 272
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