October 2006
Intermediate to advanced
888 pages
16h 55m
English
Content preview from The Ruby Way: Solutions and Techniques in Ruby Programming, Second Edition
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Chapter 10. I/O and Data Storage
On a clean disk you can seek forever.
—Thomas B. Steel, Jr.
Computers are good at computing. This tautology is more profound than it appears. If we only had to sit and chew up the CPU cycles and reference RAM as needed, life would be easy.
A computer that only sits and thinks to itself is of little use, however. Sooner or later we have to get information into it and out of it, and that is where life becomes more difficult.
Several things make I/O complicated. First, input and output are rather different things, but we naturally lump them together. Second, the varieties of I/O operations (and their usages) are as diverse as species of insects.
History has seen such devices as drums, paper tapes, magnetic tapes, ...
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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.
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