Course Length:

3 Days

Course Description:

This course covers the fundamental components of the Ruby Programming Language. Emphasis is placed on the object oriented aspects of Ruby. Topics include arrays, hashes, regular expressions, io, exceptions, modules, and applications areas.

Who Should Attend:

This course is intended primarily for those who have programmed in other programming languages such as, but not limited to, C, C++, Java, or Perl.

Benefits of Attendance:

Upon completion of this course, students will be able to:

• Distinguish and use various Ruby datatypes
• Master the use of arrays and hashes
• Build home grown classes
• Use the extensive pre bundled classes
• Use the I/O facilities of Ruby to read and write binary and text files
• Master the use of Iterators to loop through various data structures
• Use Exceptions in handling various run time errors
• Create Ruby modules
• Use the wide variety of Ruby Modules that come with the Ruby distribution

Prerequisites:

Students should have taken the Software Development for Non-Programmers course or have at least six months of programming experience in at least one programming language.

Course Outline:

• Chapter 1: An Overview Of Ruby (Part 1)
  1. What is Ruby?
  2. Executing Ruby Code
  3. Getting Input
  4. Comments
  5. Numbers
  6. Strings
  7. The Class Class
  8. Decision Making
  9. The case Construct
  10. Loops
  11. Iterators
  12. Regular Expressions
  13. Functions
  14. Odds and Ends
  15. Time Methods
• Chapter 2: An Overview of Ruby (Part 2)
  1. Arrays
  2. Array Operator Methods
  3. Array Equality Operator
  4. Arrays as Stacks and Queues
  5. Higher Dimensional Arrays
  6. Other Useful Arrays Methods
  7. Command Line Arguments
  8. Hashes
  9. Common Hash Methods
  10. Sorting Hashes
  11. Iterators with Arrays and Hashes
  12. Arrays and Functions
  13. Hashes and Functions
  14. Named Parameters
  15. Symbols
  16. Procs
  17. Closures
• Chapter 3: Classes
  1. Objects
  2. Brief History of OOP
  3. OOP Vocabulary
  4. Creating a New Class
  5. Using Objects
  6. Defining Operator Methods
  7. Inheritance
  8. Ancestors
  9. self
  10. Access Levels - public
  11. Access Levels – private
  12. Access Levels - protected
  13. Access Levels - Specification
  14. Class Data and Class Methods
  15. Adding Methods to Classes and Objects
  16. Special Global Variables
  17. Scope of Variables
  18. Built-in Classes
  19. The Math Class
  20. The NilClass Class
  21. TrueClass and FalseClass
  22. Built-in Class Hierarchy
• Chapter 4: Input and Output
  1. Introduction
  2. Reading from the Standard Input
  3. Reading a Character at a Time
  4. Writing to the Standard Output
  5. Reading and Writing Disk Files
  6. Reading Files Using Iterators
  7. I/O With Command Line Commands
  8. Seeking About Files
  9. tell
  10. Capturing Data About Files
  11. Processing Directories
• Chapter 5: Exceptions
  1. Introduction
  2. Exceptions
  3. Handling Exceptions
  4. Multiple Rescue Clauses
  5. Exceptions are Classes
  6. ensure
  7. retry
  8. raise
  9. Creating Your Own Exceptions
  10. catch and throw
• Chapter 6: Modules
  1. Introduction
  2. Using Core Ruby Classes
  3. Ruby Standard Library
  4. require
  5. Search Path
  6. File Organization
  7. Load
  8. Modules
  9. include
  10. Mixins
  11. Using the Comparable Module
  12. Collection Classes
  13. yield
  14. Using the Enumerable Module
• Chapter 7: Odds and Ends
  1. Ruby Conventions
  2. Strings Are References
  3. The Selection Operator, [ ]
  4. Index Methods
  5. Stripping Whitespace Characters
  6. Bit Manipulation
  7. The upto Method
  8. Substituting
  9. Processing a Line at a Time
  10. Marshalling
  11. Reflection
  12. grep
  13. Classes are Objects
  14. Aliasing
  15. Testing
  16. Test::Unit
  17. Testing Your Own Classes
  18. Freezing Objects