Before the international conferences, before Ruby on Rails, Ruby already had a niche: it was a quintessential “glue language”, in the lineage of Bash, sed, awk, and Perl.
What’s a glue language? That’s a tricky definition to pin down. But in a nutshell, it’s the language you reach for when you need to quickly connect one program to another, or munge some data into a different shape, or derive some quick-and-dirty stats. It’s a language that lets you start with as little as a single line of code on the command-line and gradually build up a custom tool.
This course is all about these kinds of utility uses of Ruby. You’ll learn about Ruby’s extensive language of “special variables” that enable you to concisely alter global behavior. You’ll get an an advanced course in writing Ruby one-liners, and learn all about the special command-line flags specifically for these kinds of one-off programs. And you’ll learn tips and tricks for structuring larger tools written in Ruby.
This course is a Graceful.Dev Garden Path, which means it is a guided pathway through a collection of (mostly) self-contained topics. Its status is: growing, meaning that there is a significant amount of material here already, and more is expected in the future.
Prerequisites: A working knowledge of Ruby is assumed. Consider working through some or all of the Ruby Fluency garden tour before starting on this path.
Course Content
Course Includes
- 5 Modules
- 23 Topics
