CSC/ECE 517 Fall 2012/ch1b 1w54 go

SaaS Ruby 101

Introduction

The Coursera video series were created to give free college level lessons to anyone with internet access. The Saas video discussed in this wiki page is the Ruby 101 provided by California University. The video covers the fundamentals of the Ruby language and the basic concepts needed to write programs. More information about the language can be found at its Wikipedia page.

The sections below will highlight the key points of the video lecture and try to help provide further detail surrounding the concepts in the video.

What is Ruby

The Ruby language is an interpreted scripting language, meaning that there is no compile time as in other languages. Without the compile time, Ruby programs lose many warnings that programmers rely on for safety however as long as you stick to the Ruby conventions, these pitfalls can be avoided. It is an object oriented language as well. Ruby follows the object oriented paradigm so closely that everything in Ruby in an object. What this means is that all operations on objects are essentially method calls on objects. In addition this gives Ruby objects the ability to ask about themsevles via reflection. This is one of the keys to properly understanding Ruby.

Ruby is a dynamically typed language meaning that the type of some things may not be determinable until run time. All objects have types but variables do not have to have types associated with them. It is possible to see a variable that is given the value of 1 (Ex. x = 1) and then later in the code the variable is then given a string value (Ex. x = 'Hello World'). The fact that Ruby is a dynamic language gives the developer immense power and can be used to leverage code modification at runtime which is referred to as metaprogramming. The idea of metaprogramming is so pervasive in the language that you can consider all programming in Ruby to be metaprogramming.

For information on metaprogramming specifically applied to Ruby, please consult the references section.

Naming conventions and general syntax

Ruby makes use of two naming conventions that you might be familiar with from experience with other languages. Upper camel case and snake case are used to help differentiate class names and methods/variables. This helps someone who is reading Ruby code to know when you're referring to a class versus a method. In addition to these general naming conventions Ruby also allows you to leverage the question mark and exclamation mark characters to help signify what the method is doing. A question mark usually signifies a Boolean method where an exclamation mark signifies a dangerous method. Constants are always defined with full capitol letters and are scoped to only the places where they're defined, for example to the defining class or method.

Naming Convention Examples

UpperCamelCase
Conventionally used to define a class. Upper Cammel Case requires that the first letter of each word be capitolized.
Ex. class MyNewClass
snake_case
Usually used to define methods or variables contains a snake character or underscore between words.
Ex. def learn_conventions
def how_many_items?
The question mark added to the end of this method definition helps to signal the programmer who may be reading this code that this will return a Boolean or predicate value
def save!
THe question mark added to the end of this method definition helps to signal the programmer that this method does something destructive or can not be reversed.

When writing or learning about Ruby, you may hear the term "syntactic sugar". What this refers to is the parts of a "normal" declaration of code that may seem superfluous. In Ruby, this superfluous code can be ignored and as long as the code still makes relative sense, the interpreter will pick up the code and continue processing. This is a big deal because it helps Ruby code become more readable to someone who may not be familiar with programming and also makes the code flow better. An example of this is when dealing with a new line in Ruby. While the presence of a semicolon or the keyword end will always signal the end of a statement, a newline can be substituted in most cases. This is similar to the flexibility that Java provides with single statement if and while loops. The beginning and ending brace characters were not required because the Java compiler can skip over this. While it is true that you can reduce the code you write to make the code more humanly readable, there are times when you will want to still include some of the optional syntax in more complex methods. The point that Armando makes in the video lecture is that you want to be defensive with this, when in doubt add the optional syntax.

Syntactic Sugar Examples The sample code listed below is a factorial example written with normal Ruby conventions of removing unneeded syntax. Notice that it is missing some of the elements that are common in other languages

def fact(n)
  if n == 0
    1
  else
    n * fact(n-1)
  end
end

Variables

In Ruby local variables do not have a value until they are explicitly given one. This means that all local variables, this includes instance and class variables, must be assigned before use otherwise they are have the value of nil. The keyword nil in Ruby is exactly the same as null in other languages. Variable definitions are not valid in Ruby, you will never see a class name prior to a variable. Constant variables are always scoped to where they are defined (local or class) however, Global variables are accessible anywhere and at any time. In Ruby just like other languages you want to avoid the use of global variables if at all possible.

Variable Examples Valid variable declarations

x = 3
x = 'foo'
x = [1, 'two', :three]

Invalid declarations

Integer x
Integer x = 1

Strings in Ruby are treated very similarly to how they are treated in Java however, Ruby also includes a special type of string called a symbol. Symbols are essentially [en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Immutable_object immutable] strings and their value is just themselves. They begin with a colon and then a lowercase name, (e.g. :symbol is a symbol). Although symbols are a special type of string, they are not actually strings. A symbol and a string with the same name will not be equal to one another. Symbols are used to denote something as being special, it specifies that the name used is not arbitrary and is one of a fixed set.

String examples

mystring = 'Hello World'
mystring = "Hello World #"

Symbol examples

mystring = :hello

String and symbol interaction examples
Note in this set of examples, the hash (#) character denotes the beginning of a comment

:hello.to_s == "hello"
"hello".to_sym == :hello
:hello == "hello" #evaluate to false

Arrays and Hashes

Hashes, also known as dictionaries, are like arrays that have key->value pairs as their entries. The values for each key does not have to be the same type as the key that references it.