November 2001
Intermediate to advanced
218 pages
6h 22m
English
Content preview from Ruby in a NutshellBecome an O’Reilly member and get unlimited access to this title plus top books and audiobooks from O’Reilly and nearly 200 top publishers, thousands of courses curated by job role, 150+ live events each month,
O’Reilly covers everything we've got, with content to help us build a world-class technology community, upgrade the capabilities and competencies of our teams, and improve overall team performance as well as their engagement.I wanted to learn C and C++, but it didn't click for me until I picked up an O'Reilly book. When I went on the O’Reilly platform, I was astonished to find all the books there, plus live events and sandboxes so you could play around with the technology.I’ve been on the O’Reilly platform for more than eight years. I use a couple of learning platforms, but I'm on O'Reilly more than anybody else. When you're there, you start learning. I'm never disappointed.I'm always learning. So when I got on to O'Reilly, I was like a kid in a candy store. There are playlists. There are answers. There's on-demand training. It's worth its weight in gold, in terms of what it allows me to do.
Ruby’s Elegance
Ruby is a genuine object-oriented scripting language designed from the ground up to support the OOP model.
Most modern languages incorporate aspects of object-oriented programming. Because Ruby was designed from the beginning to support OOP, most programmers feel it is elegant, easy to use, and a pleasure to program. Everything in Ruby is an object; there’s no exception.
While Ruby is object-oriented, you can also use Ruby to do procedural programming. But as you do, Ruby is secretly turning your nifty procedures into methods on a globally accessible object.
Throughout the development of the Ruby language, I’ve focused my energies on making programming faster and easier. To do so, I developed what I call the principle of least surprise. All features in Ruby, including object-oriented features, are designed to work as ordinary programmers (e.g., me) expect them to work. Here are some of those features:
- Interpretive programming
No compilation is needed; you can edit and feed your program to the interpreter. The faster development cycle helps you enjoy the programming process.
- Dynamic programming
Almost everything in Ruby is done at runtime. Types of variables and expressions are determined at runtime as are class and method definitions. You can even generate programs within programs and execute them.
- Familiar syntax
If you’ve been programming in Java, Perl, Python, C/C++, or even Smalltalk, Ruby’s syntax is easy to learn. The following simple factorial function illustrates ...
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O’Reilly covers everything we've got, with content to help us build a world-class technology community, upgrade the capabilities and competencies of our teams, and improve overall team performance as well as their engagement.Julian F.
I wanted to learn C and C++, but it didn't click for me until I picked up an O'Reilly book. When I went on the O’Reilly platform, I was astonished to find all the books there, plus live events and sandboxes so you could play around with the technology.Addison B.
I’ve been on the O’Reilly platform for more than eight years. I use a couple of learning platforms, but I'm on O'Reilly more than anybody else. When you're there, you start learning. I'm never disappointed.Amir M.
I'm always learning. So when I got on to O'Reilly, I was like a kid in a candy store. There are playlists. There are answers. There's on-demand training. It's worth its weight in gold, in terms of what it allows me to do.