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The Ruby Programming Language
Read an excerpt:
Chapter 4: Expressions and Operators
Excerpt provided courtesy of O'Reilly Media. Copyright © O'Reilly Media, Inc. Written permission from the publisher is required for any use of this material.
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Ruby has gained some attention through the popular Ruby on Rails web development
framework, but the language alone is worthy of more consideration -- a lot more.
This book offers a definition explanation of this powerful and extremely flexible
language, which draws inspiration from Lisp, Smalltalk and Perl, but uses a grammar
that's easy for C and Java programmers to learn.
With The Ruby Programming Language, you will quickly learn your way around
versions 1.8 and 1.9, and discover why this pure object-oriented language is also
suitable for procedural and functional programming styles. You'll learn Ruby's
lexical structure, primary expressions, conditionals, syntax, classes, the data
it manipulates, and more. Ruby blurs the distinction between language and platform,
so this book includes a tour of the core Ruby API. But the primary subject is
the language itself, including:
- Ruby's lexical structure including basic issues like character set, case
sensitivity and reserved words
- Numbers, strings, ranges, arrays, and other data that Ruby programs can
manipulate, plus basic features of all Ruby objects
- Primary expressions in Ruby -- literals, variable references, method invocations
and assignments
- Conditionals, loops (including blocks and iterator methods), exceptions
and other Ruby expressions
- Ruby's method definition and invocation syntax, and the invokeable objects
known as procs and lambdas
- An explanation of closures in Ruby and an exploration of functional programming
techniques
- Classes and modules in Ruby, inheritance, method visibility, mixing modules
and the method name resolution algorithm
- Ruby APIs that allow a program to inspect and manipulate itself, and metaprogramming
techniques that use the APIs to extend Ruby's syntax for easier programming
- A quick tutorial of the Ruby platform -- the most important classes and
methods, text processing, numeric computation, collections, input/output,
networking and threads
The Ruby Programming Language also covers the top-level Ruby programming
environment, including global variables and functions, command-line arguments
supported by the Ruby interpreter, and Ruby's security mechanism. If you're
an experienced programmer who wants a look at this language in depth, this easy-to-follow
guide is invaluable.
About the Author
David Flanagan is a computer programmer who spends most of his time writing
about JavaScript and Java. His books with O'Reilly include Java in a Nutshell,
Java Examples in a Nutshell, Java Foundation Classes in a Nutshell, JavaScript:
The Definitive Guide, and JavaScript Pocket Reference. David has a degree in
computer science and engineering from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology.
He lives with his wife and children in the U.S. Pacific Northwest bewteen the
cities of Seattle, Washington and Vancouver, British Columbia. David has a blog
at www.davidflanagan.com.
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