The Ruby Programming Language

This book is a comprehensive and definitive explanation of the Ruby programming language, which has become the basis for the extremely popular Ruby on Rails web development framework. The book itself is not about web development or the framework, but helps experienced programmers look at the language in depth, including the structure of a Ruby program and its values, expressions, statements, classes, methods, and more.

David Flanagan is a computer programmer who spends most of his time writing about JavaScript and Java. His books with O'Reilly include JavaScript: The Definitive Guide, JavaScript Pocket Reference, Java in a Nutshell, Java Examples in a Nutshell, and Java Foundation Classes in a Nutshell. 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.

Yukihiro Matsumoto ("Matz"), the creator of Ruby, is a professional programmer who worked for the Japanese open source company, netlab.jp. Matz is also known as one of the open source evangelists in Japan. He's released several open source products, including cmail, the emacs-based mail user agent, written entirely in emacs lisp. Ruby is his first piece of software that has become known outside of Japan.

Preface	p. ix
Introduction	p. 1
A Tour of Ruby	p. 2
Try Ruby	p. 11
About This Book	p. 15
A Sudoku Solver in Ruby	p. 17
The Structure and Execution of Ruby Programs	p. 25
Lexical Structure	p. 26
Syntactic Structure	p. 33
File Structure	p. 35
Program Encoding	p. 36
Program Execution	p. 39
Datatypes and Objects	p. 41
Numbers	p. 42
Text	p. 46
Arrays	p. 64
Hashes	p. 67
Ranges	p. 68
Symbols	p. 71
True, False, and Nil	p. 72
Objects	p. 72
Expressions and Operators	p. 85
Literals and Keyword Literals	p. 86
Variable References	p. 87
Constant References	p. 88
Method Invocations	p. 89
Assignments	p. 92
Operators	p. 100
Statements and Control Structures	p. 117
Conditionals	p. 118
Loops	p. 127
Iterators and Enumerable Objects	p. 130
Blocks	p. 140
Altering Control Flow	p. 146
Exceptions and Exception Handling	p. 154
BEGIN and END	p. 165
Threads, Fibers, and Continuations	p. 166
Methods, Procs, Lambdas, and Closures	p. 175
Defining Simple Methods	p. 177
Method Names	p. 180
Methods and Parentheses	p. 183
Method Arguments	p. 185
Procs and Lambdas	p. 192
Closures	p. 200
Method Objects	p. 203
Functional Programming	p. 205
Classes and Modules	p. 213
Defining a Simple Class	p. 214
Method Visibility: Public, Protected, Private	p. 232
Subclassing and Inheritance	p. 234
Object Creation and Initialization	p. 241
Modules	p. 247
Loading and Requiring Modules	p. 252
Singleton Methods and the Eigenclass	p. 257
Method Lookup	p. 258
Constant Lookup	p. 261
Reflection and Metaprogramming	p. 265
Types, Classes, and Modules	p. 266
Evaluating Strings and Blocks	p. 268
Variables and Constants	p. 271
Methods	p. 272
Hooks	p. 277
Tracing	p. 279
ObjectSpace and GC	p. 281
Custom Control Structures	p. 281
Missing Methods and Missing Constants	p. 284
Dynamically Creating Methods	p. 287
Alias Chaining	p. 290
Domain-Specific Languages	p. 296
The Ruby Platform	p. 303
Strings	p. 304
Regular Expressions	p. 310
Numbers and Math	p. 321
Dates and Times	p. 325
Collections	p. 328
Files and Directories	p. 350
Input/Output	p. 356
Networking	p. 366
Threads and Concurrency	p. 372
The Ruby Environment	p. 389
Invoking the Ruby Interpreter	p. 390
The Top-Level Environment	p. 394
Practical Extraction and Reporting Shortcuts	p. 403
Calling the OS	p. 405
Security	p. 409
Index	p. 413
Table of Contents provided by Ingram. All Rights Reserved.

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The Ruby Programming Language

Summary

Author Biography

Table of Contents

Supplemental Materials