Collected Ruby

From a functional programming perspective, every program is just transformations of data structures, with some side-effects along the way. But there’s a world of nuance in those transformations. Especially in Ruby, which goes to great lengths to provide you with just the right tool for every data-maneuver you could possibly want to execute.

Collected Ruby is an intermediate-to-advanced course in building, retrieving values from, combining, searching, traversing, transforming, and reducing data in Ruby’s core collection classes: Arrays and Hashes. These two classes provide 95% of the collection functionality you need in most programs. For the other 5%, there are specialty collections like Set—which this course also introduces.

There’s a lot of material in this path. Including topics on:

• Building and combining collections.
• Extracting just the values you need.
• Iteration and other forms of collection traversal, including lazy traversal with Enumerators.
• Efficiently searching and sorting.
• Transforming and mapping collections from one shape to another.
• Reducing over collections to gather statistics of various kinds.

This course is a Graceful.Dev Garden Path, meaning it is a suggested pathway through a curated selection of self-contained topics. Its status is mature: new topics may still be added, but it is a fully fleshed-out course of study.

Prerequisites: You’ll need basic Ruby familiarity. This course is part of the Fluent Ruby garden tour, which contains a suggested sequence of courses.