Table of Contents

Introduction: Welcome To The Little Book Of Ruby

- Learn Ruby In Ten Chapters
- What Is Ruby?
- What Is Rails?
- Download Ruby plus an Editor
- Get The Source Code Of The Sample Programs
- Running Ruby Programs
- How To Use This Book
- Making Sense Of The Text

Chapter One: Strings and Methods

- Strings and Embedded Evaluation
- Methods
- Numbers
- Testing a Condition: if … then

Chapter Two: Classes and Objects

- Instances and Instance Variables

Pretend that you’ve opened this book (although you probably have opened this book), just to find a huge onion right in the middle crease of the book. (The manufacturer of the book has included the onion at my request.)

So you’re like, “Wow, this book comes with an onion!” (Even if you don’t particularly like onions, I’m sure you can appreciate the logistics of shipping any sort of produce discreetly inside of an alleged programming manual.)

Contents:

* Contents
* Language
o General Syntax Rules
o Reserved words
o Types
+ Numbers
+ Strings
# Backslashes
# Here Docs
+ Symbols
+ Ranges
+ Regexen
+ Arrays
+ Hashes
+ Files
# Mode Strings
o Variables
o Pseudo variables
o Pre-defined variables
o Pre-defined global constants
o Expressions
+ Terms
+ Operators and Precedence
+ Control Expressions
o Invoking a Method
o Defining a Class
o Defining a Module

Table of contents

1 Welcome to Ruby
Basic Concepts of Ruby
Types in Ruby
Collections
Variables and the Like

2 Break it down now!
Methods
Blocks and Proc Objects
Modules
Files

3 Hustle and flow (control)
Conditionals
Loops
Exceptions

4 The System Beneath
Filesystem Interaction
Threads and Forks and Processes
Environment variables, command line
Win32 and Beyond

5 Looking Beyond Home
Networking and the Web
It's Like Distributed or Something...

This book is a tutorial and reference for the Ruby programming language. Use Ruby, and you'll write better code, be more productive, and enjoy programming more.

These are bold claims, but we think that after reading this book you'll agree with them. And we have the experience to back up this belief.

As Pragmatic Programmers we've tried many, many languages in our search for tools to make our lives easier, for tools to help us do our jobs better. Until now, though, we'd always been frustrated by the languages we were using.