Part 1 Ruby foundations 1

Chapter 1 Bootstrapping your Ruby literacy

Basic Ruby language literacy

Anatomy of the Ruby installation

Ruby extensions and programming libraries

Out-of-the-box Ruby tools and applications

Summary

 

Chapter 2 Objects, methods, and local variables

Talking to objects

Crafting an object: the behavior of a ticket

The innate behaviors of an object

A close look at method arguments

What you can’t do in argument lists

Local variables and variable assignment

Summary

 

Chapter 3 Organizing objects with classes

Classes and instances

Instance variables and object state

Setter methods

Attributes and the attr_* method family

Inheritance and the Ruby class hierarchy

Classes as objects and message receivers

Constants up close

Nature vs. nurture in Ruby objects

Summary

 

Chapter 4 Modules and program organization

Basics of module creation and use

Modules, classes, and method lookup

The method_missing method

Class/module design and naming

Summary

 

Chapter 5 The default object (self), scope, and visibility

Understanding self, the current/default object

Determining scope

Deploying method-access rules

Writing and using top-level methods

Summary

 

Chapter 6 Control-flow techniques

Conditional code execution

Repeating actions with loops

Iterators and code blocks

Error handling and exceptions

Summary

Part 2 Built-in classes and modules

Chapter 7 Built-in essentials

Ruby’s literal constructors

Recurrent syntactic sugar

Bang (!) methods and “danger”

Built-in and custom to_* (conversion) methods

Boolean states, boolean objects, and nil

Comparing two objects

Inspecting object capabilities

Summary

 

Chapter 8 Strings, symbols, and other scalar objects

Working with strings

Symbols and their uses

Numerical objects

Times and dates

Summary

 

Chapter 9 Collection and container objects

Arrays and hashes in comparison

Collection handling with arrays

Hashes

Ranges

Sets

Exploring the set.rb source code

Summary

 

Chapter 10 Collections central: Enumerable and Enumerator

Gaining enumerability through each

Enumerable boolean queries

Enumerable searching and selecting

Element-wise enumerable operations

The relatives of each

The map method

Strings as quasi-enumerables

Sorting enumerables

Enumerators and the next dimension of enumerability

Enumerator semantics and uses

Enumerator method chaining

Summary

 

Chapter 11 Regular expressions and regexp-based string operations

What are regular expressions?

Writing regular expressions

Building a pattern in a regular expression

Matching, substring captures, and MatchData

Fine-tuning regular expressions with quantifiers, anchors, and modifiers

Converting strings and regular expressions to each other

Common methods that use regular expressions

Summary

 

Chapter 12 File, I/O, and system operations

How Ruby’s I/O system is put together

Basic file operations

Querying IO and File objects

Directory manipulation with the Dir class

File tools from the standard library

Summary

Part 3 Ruby dynamics

Chapter 13 Object individuation

Where the singleton methods are: the singleton class

Modifying Ruby’s core classes and modules

BasicObject as ancestor and class

Summary

 

Chapter 14 Callable and runnable objects

Basic anonymous functions: the Proc class

Creating functions with lambda and ->

Methods as objects

The eval family of methods

Parallel execution with threads

Issuing system commands from inside Ruby programs

Summary

 

Chapter 15 Callbacks, hooks, and runtime introspection

Callbacks and hooks

Interpreting object capability queries

Introspection of variables and constants

Tracing execution

Callbacks and method inspection in practice

Summary