master Ruby

“Practice makes perfect”, as the saying goes. Earning a living programming Ruby has been giving me plenty of practice. And, even in this age of googling, I find it very helpful to have good books at hand to refer to. Recently I bought “The Ruby Programming Language” by David Flanagan and Yukihiro Matsumoto, which I’m find to be an excellent reference.

I don’t consider myself a Ruby master yet, but I’m getting there…

Soon I intend to spend some time experimenting with metaprogramming in Ruby. It sounds like there’s some real gold therein.

Haven’t done a lot of Ruby coding lately but I’m determined to make more use of it and become more knowledgeable and proficient. To that end I’ve recently purchased the second edition of “The Ruby Way” by Hal Fulton. I love his philosophy and the book is proving to be an excellent resource so far.

I learnt a thing or two last night as I wrote a script to read a file, look for dates in dd/mm/yyyy format and convert them to yyyy-mm-dd format.

What did I learn?

• How easy it is to process a file in Ruby. IO.foreach passes each line of the file to a block. So easy compared to Java!

• How Ruby has some odd syntactic quirks inherited from Perl, for example in dealing with pattern matching using regular expressions. Using a variables like $& (to hold the matched string) and $’ (to hold the remainder of the string) sure is concise but for my money a tad cryptic!

Anyway, I learnt something and the resulting script was useful.

I think of got a pretty good grasp of Ruby now, mainly via learning Rails and referring to the Pickaxe book. Ruby’s characteristics like duck typing and closures give me fond memories of the first OO language I learnt, which was Smalltalk back in about 1995.

Java still pays my bills but I reckon Ruby has a big future.

Anyway, even if it doesn’t carve out a huge market share, it’s fun! So I want to learn more.