January 2008
Beginner to intermediate
446 pages
14h 45m
English
Content preview from The Ruby Programming LanguageBecome 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.
Program Encoding
At the lowest level, a Ruby program is simply a sequence of
characters. Ruby’s lexical rules are defined using characters of the ASCII character set. Comments begin with the # character (ASCII
code 35), for example, and allowed whitespace characters are horizontal
tab (ASCII 9), newline (10), vertical tab (11), form feed (12), carriage
return (13), and space (32). All Ruby keywords are written using ASCII
characters, and all operators and other punctuation are drawn from the
ASCII character set.
By default, the Ruby interpreter assumes that Ruby source code is encoded in ASCII. This is not required, however; the interpreter can also process files that use other encodings, as long as those encodings can represent the full set of ASCII characters. In order for the Ruby interpreter to be able to interpret the bytes of a source file as characters, it must know what encoding to use. Ruby files can identify their own encodings or you can tell the interpreter how they are encoded. Doing so is explained shortly.
The Ruby interpreter is actually quite flexible about the characters that appear in a Ruby program. Certain ASCII characters have specific meanings, and certain ASCII characters are not allowed in identifiers, but beyond that, a Ruby program may contain any characters allowed by the encoding. We explained earlier that identifiers may contain characters outside of the ASCII character set. The same is true for comments and string and regular expression literals: they ...
Become 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,
and much more.
Read now
Unlock full access
More than 5,000 organizations count on O’Reilly
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.