Ruby Fundamentals Workshop

This course if offered both as a public class and as an on-site class. Please contact us if you would like to sign up for either.

Download a PDF brochure for the Ruby Fundamentals Workshop.

Workshop Goals

The goal of the workshop is to give each participant a solid foundation on which to quickly become a productive Ruby developer. And if the participant chooses, s/he will be well-positioned to go on to learning Ruby on Rails. Beyond the language's basics, the course focuses on the features of Ruby that give it its distinct power. These include:

• Object-oriented techniques to make code well-organized and maintainable
• The advantages of dynamic typing and open classes
• How blocks add clarity to thought and source code
• Efficient error-handling with exceptions
• Flexible numeric libraries to achieve precision and avoid under- and overflow
• Manipulating text with regular expressions

Workshop Duration

Three days. If you would like to discuss alternate scheduling options, please contact us.

Prerequisites

Participants should already be comfortable with one high-level programming language, such as Java, C#, C++, C, Python, Perl, etc.

Workshop Topics

• Introduction and History (very brief)
• Language Basics
• Ruby Development Tool Set
• Console I/O
• String Type and Operations
• Numeric Types and Mathematical Expressions
• Boolean Expressions
• Conditional Constructs
• Arrays
• Loop Constructs
• Code Blocks
• Ranges
• Regular Expressions
• Symbols
• Hashes
• Methods
• Object-Oriented Programming
• Classes, Attributes, Methods
• Access Control
• Class Variables and Methods
• Inheritance
• Global Variables and Constants
• Formatted Textual Output
• File I/O
• Storing and Retrieving Structured Data with YAML
• Unit Testing with Test::Unit
• Leveraging Libraries
• RubyForge and RubyGems
• Packaging Programs and Libraries for Distribution

Materials Provided

Each participant receives:

• A comprehensive course book containing all workshop slides (over 650).
• A CD containing workshop examples, exercise solutions, and other tools and reference materials as allowed by license.
• A certificate of completion.