Data Structures and Algorithms
with Object-Oriented Design Patterns in Ruby

In Ruby, classes and objects are intricately connected in ways that might not be immediately obvious. Owing to their special use-case, it is easy to lose sight of the fact that classes are themselves objects in Ruby. What makes them different, vis-à-vis regular objects, is that they serve as a blueprint for object creation and also that they are part of a hierarchy of classes. That is, classes can have instances (objects), superclasses (parents) and subclasses (children).

Hacker News
This tiny script is a scraper for http://news.ycombinator.com. It shows just how little Ruby is required to run a powerful web filter.

What it be doin':
Fetches the YCombinator news page
HPricot's it into pieces
Builds an RSS feed
Uses links to parse the destination article page and include the main text inline
Runs as a stand-alone server thanks to Rack and Mongrel

Ruby was written to make the programmer’s job easy and not care if the computer’s job is hard. In this brief introduction we’ll look at the key language features you need to get started.

Ruby is a powerful language, but how much power does it have if you remove all of its datatypes except for Proc and all of its features except for Proc.new and Proc#call? I’ll investigate by building proc-only representations of numbers, booleans, lists and strings, and using them to write an executable program.

This article is adapted from a talk I gave at the Ru3y Manor conference, for which the video and slides are available.

We're going to teach you how to build your first Ruby web application in 3 minutes and deploy it live to the internet. Don't worry, you won't have to install or setup anything. We'll take care of all those pesky little details: Ruby, Rails, Git, Gems, configuring SSH keys, and deploying your application to a server.

Helping Ruby Programmers become Awesome!