The Ruby Beginner's Guide (5th Edition)

The Ruby Beginner's Guide (5th Edition) is the Chinese translation of the fifth edition of the classic Japanese Ruby introductory book Tanoshii Ruby, co-authored by Yukihiro Takahashi, founder of the Japan Ruby Association, and Yuzo Goto, reviewed and recommended with a preface by Ruby's creator Yukihiro Matsumoto, translated by He Wensi, and published in 2017 by Posts & Telecom Press as part of the Turing Programming Series. The book is written for Ruby 2.3 and aimed at readers with no programming experience at all. It starts with "how to run the ruby command" and "how to use the irb interactive environment," then uses the most basic elements—strings, numbers, the puts/p methods, variables, comments, conditionals, and loops—to get readers writing small runnable programs as quickly as possible. It then systematically explains Ruby's core syntax: objects, classes, and methods; the scope of variables and constants; multiple assignment; the various forms of conditionals and loops; method definition and parameters; classes and modules; operator overloading; error handling and exceptions; blocks and iterators. Next, it introduces commonly used classes chapter by chapter: numbers, arrays, strings, hashes, regular expressions, IO, File and Dir, Encoding, Time and Date, Proc, and others. Finally, two examples—text processing and postal code lookup—tie the knowledge together into small runnable tools. The appendixes provide a guide to setting up a Ruby environment and a quick-reference syntax guide; some chapters include exercises, with answers and all the book's code included.