Advanced Ruby Programming: 10 Steps to Mastery

What are class methods and what are they used for? 

How to use class methods and class variables and why it’s important to understand that classes are objects too!

How to add methods to a specific object rather than to an entire class

Regular arguments and default arguments, a discussion of parentheses, single and multiple return values and parallel assignment

Usually, there is one way to pass data to a method in a Ruby object and one way to get data back out again. But there are exceptions to the rule. Here I discuss the importance of encapsulation and information hiding.

Trapping exceptions and recovering from errors in your code. The fundamentals of exception handling techniques in Ruby.

Exceptions are objects and they have a class hierarchy which can be useful to you when handling specific types of error

In Ruby blocks are like ‘nameless methods’ that are often used in iterators. This short video explains the basics

Blocks, procs, lambdas, block parameters, closures, passing blocks as arguments, yielding anonymous blocks and using blocks as iterators

Symbols are widely used in Ruby programming. Here we find out what’s special about them

This is Chapter 11 of The Book Of Ruby. It explains symbols.

Threads and Fibers can help you to write programs that do more than one thing at a time. But they can be tricky things to use effectively!

Ruby does not implement ‘multiple inheritance’. So how can a class include features from multiple parent classes? The answer is: it can’t. But it can mix-in multiple modules…

You just have to look at a module definition to see how similar it is to a class. But the resemblance is not superficial. Here I explain the relationship between a Class and a Module.

Modules as namespaces and as mixins. How to access module constants, module methods and instance methods and how to avoid potential problems 

How to use Ruby's File and IO classes to read, write and copy files. How to find file information and traverse directories and subdirectories recursively.

How to save and load structured data to and from disk in a human readable format.

You can use Marshal to read and write byte streams of data to and from disk

This explains the fundamentals of matching text patterns to find or modify strings using Regular Expressions

Some sample programs show how you can match patterns substitute text or create new files – for example, containing extracted documentation – using Regular Expressions

How to add and remove methods at runtime, deal with method-calls to methods that don’t exist and evaluate strings as Ruby code.

In Ruby you don’t have to write a complete program before you run it. You can add new Ruby code to the program that is running. Here’s a simple example.