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What is Bundler?

Wed, 22 Feb 2012 03:39:22 +0000

Bundler is a program that managed gem dependencies for your Ruby projects. In a nutshell, you give it a list of the gems your program needs and Bundler installs them. But there's a bit more to it than that, Bundler also manages the versions of gems installed, so everyone who runs Bundler will be working from the same version of the same gems.

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Iterating Over Strings

Thu, 16 Feb 2012 04:47:23 +0000

How do you iterate over a string? Easy, just iterate over each byte, right? It's not quite that easy, Unicode complicates this. Ruby's default encoding is UTF-8, which means most, but not all, characters will be 8 bits wide. But don't worry, Ruby makes it simple.

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Method Visibility

Fri, 10 Feb 2012 04:39:38 +0000

Method visibility is crucial to object oriented programming. In order to maintain encapsulation, you must be able to prevent a user from calling methods that update the internal state of the object without sufficient checks. Ruby provides support for this via public, private and protected methods. However, since Ruby is a very open language these are merely suggestions, a determined user can call any method if they really want to.

Overloading Operators in Ruby

Tue, 31 Jan 2012 21:39:18 +0000

Ruby allows you to overload the arithmetic operators (as well as a few others). This allows you define what a + b mean, even though a and b are types that you have defined. This can lead to some very compact and expressive high-level code, as well as allowing you to implement some idiomatic Rubyisms (such as << to append to collections).

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Partitioning Strings

Thu, 26 Jan 2012 14:11:18 +0000

The 'split' method isn't the only fish in the sea. The 'partition' method is similar, but doesn't consume the split string.

The Curious Case of the Flip-Flop Operator

Thu, 26 Jan 2012 04:26:29 +0000

The Flip-Flop operator is an odd thing. It uses the range syntax, but doesn't produce a Range object. Sometimes, it's true, sometimes it's false, but most of the time it's just confusion. Should you be using it in your code? That's up to you, but you really should know about the flip-flop operator, should you ever encounter it.

Ranges

Tue, 24 Jan 2012 04:55:09 +0000

Most languages don't have any concept of a "range." To iterate over some numbers, you either define a minimum and maximum and iterate with a typical loop, or use a combination of comparison operators. Ruby, on the other hand, has Ranges out of the box, and they can be used in a number of intuitive ways.

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Using the Enumerable Module

Thu, 19 Jan 2012 03:23:32 +0000

Did you know that you can make any of your classes act like Ruby collections? You can use any of the methods you'd typically use on collections (like Arrays and Hashes) on your classes by simply implementing the each method and including the Enumerable module. Also, if the elements of your collection implement the spaceship (<=>) operator, your collection can even be sorted!

Read more about using the enumerable module.

Why JRuby?

Fri, 13 Jan 2012 21:45:24 +0000

Java. That single word is enough to turn many programmers away. If you're one of those people (and even if you aren't), you should read this article on why you should be using JRuby. It's perhaps not what you think it is, and certainly has its advantages.

Symbols

Sat, 07 Jan 2012 04:00:36 +0000

Symbols are a mystery to new Rubyists. They're something like strings, but what are they exactly? How do you use them effectively? As they have no real analog in most other programming languages (they're similar to #define constants in C or enums in C++ though), they're one of the stumbling blocks for new Rubyists.

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