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The Ruby Workshop

You're reading from   The Ruby Workshop Develop powerful applications by writing clean, expressive code with Ruby and Ruby on Rails

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Product type Paperback
Published in Oct 2019
Publisher Packt
ISBN-13 9781838642365
Length 544 pages
Edition 1st Edition
Languages
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Authors (4):
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Dániel Szabó Dániel Szabó
Author Profile Icon Dániel Szabó
Dániel Szabó
Akshat Paul Akshat Paul
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Akshat Paul
Peter Philips Peter Philips
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Peter Philips
Cheyne Wallace Cheyne Wallace
Author Profile Icon Cheyne Wallace
Cheyne Wallace
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Toc

Table of Contents (14) Chapters Close

Preface 1. Writing and Running Ruby Programs 2. Ruby Data Types and Operations FREE CHAPTER 3. Program Flow Ruby Methods 5. Object-Oriented programming with Ruby 6. Modules and Mixins 7. Introduction to Ruby Gems 8. Debugging with Ruby 9. Ruby Beyond the Basics l 10. Ruby Beyond the Basics ll 11. Introduction to Ruby on Rails l 12. Introduction to Ruby on Rails ll Appendix

Duck Typing

Ruby is a dynamically typed language. Other languages are statically typed. The difference comes down to whether, and how, the language enforces the consistency of the type of variables. The consistency can be enforced (or not, as in Ruby) on the method arguments.

For example, a method can have a single argument, and there is nothing that restricts the code from calling that method and passing a variable of any data type. You can pass strings, arrays, and integers into any argument you want and Ruby will not complain. However, the method implementation may complain if you pass it a type that it cannot handle.

While this behavior leads to very flexible code, it can also lead to vulnerable code or code that needs to accommodate many different types. There is a split among developers, with some who prefer dynamically typed languages over statically typed languages.

As Ruby enthusiasts, we love dynamic typing because of its flexibility and expressiveness. In statically...

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