The Ruby Way: Solutions and Techniques in Ruby Programming

For more than a decade, Ruby developers have turned to The Ruby Way for reliable “how-to” guidance on effective Ruby programming. Now, Hal Fulton and André Arko have thoroughly updated this classic guide to cover new language enhancements and developers’ experiences through Ruby 2.1.

The new edition illuminates Ruby 2.1 through 400+ examples, each answering the question: “How do I do this in Ruby?” For each example, they present both a task description and realistic technical constraints. Next, they walk step-by-step through presenting one good solution, offering detailed explanations to promote deeper understanding.

Conveniently organized by topic, The Ruby Way, Third Edition makes it easier than ever to find the specific solution you want―and to write better code by reflecting Ruby’s unique philosophy and spirit.

Coverage includes

• Ruby 2.1 overview: terminology, philosophy, and basic principles
• Best practices for strings and regular expressions
• Efficiently internationalizing your code
• Performing calculations (including trigonometry, calculus, statistics, and time/date calculations)
• Working with “Rubyesque” objects such as symbols and ranges
• Using arrays, hashes, stacks, queues, trees, graphs, and other data structures
• Efficiently storing data with YAML, JSON, and SQLite3
• Leveraging object-oriented and dynamic features, from multiple constructors to program inspection
• Building GUIs with Shoes 4, Ruby/Tk, Ruby/GTK3, QtRuby, and other toolkits
• Improving thread performance by understanding Ruby’s synchronization methods and avoiding its pitfalls
• Automating system administration with Ruby
• Data formats: JSON, XML, RSS, Atom, RMagick, PDF, and more
• Testing and debugging with RSpec, Minitest, Cucumber, byebug, and pry
• Measuring Ruby program performance
• Packaging and distributing code, and managing dependencies with Bundler
• Network programming: clients, time servers, POP, SMTP, IMAP, Open-URI
• Web applications: HTTP servers, Rails, Sinatra, HTML generation, and more
• Writing distributed Ruby software with drb
• Choosing modern development tools that maximize your productivity

All source code for this book may be downloaded at www.rubyhacker.com.

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Hal Fulton first began using Ruby in 1999. In 2001, he started work on The Ruby Way, which was the second Ruby book published in English. Fulton was an attendee at the very first Ruby conference in 2001 and has presented at numerous other Ruby conferences on three continents, including the first European Ruby Conference in 2003. He holds two degrees in computer science from the University of Mississippi and taught computer science for four years. He has worked for more than 25 years with various forms of UNIX and Linux. He is now at Simpli.fi in Fort Worth, Texas, where he works primarily in Ruby.

André Arko first encountered Ruby as a student in 2004, and reading the first edition of this book helped him decide to pursue a career as a Ruby programmer. He is team lead of Bundler, the Ruby dependency manager, and has created or contributes to dozens of other open source projects. He works at Cloud City Development as a consultant providing team training and expertise on Ruby and Rails as well as developing web applications.

André enjoys sharing hard-won knowledge and experience with other developers, and has spoken at over a dozen Ruby conferences on four continents. He is a regular volunteer at RailsBridge and RailsGirls programming outreach events, and works to increase diversity and inclusiveness in both the Ruby community and technology as a field. He lives in San Francisco, California.