The Ruby Programming Language

Preface; Acknowledgments; Conventions Used in This Book; Using Code Examples; How to Contact Us; Safari?? Enabled; Chapter 1: Introduction; 1.1 A Tour of Ruby; 1.2 Try Ruby; 1.3 About This Book; 1.4 A Sudoku Solver in Ruby; Chapter 2: The Structure and Execution of Ruby Programs; 2.1 Lexical Structure; 2.2 Syntactic Structure; 2.3 File Structure; 2.4 Program Encoding; 2.5 Program Execution; Chapter 3: Datatypes and Objects; 3.1 Numbers; 3.2 Text; 3.3 Arrays; 3.4 Hashes; 3.5 Ranges; 3.6 Symbols; 3.7 True, False, and Nil; 3.8 Objects; Chapter 4: Expressions and Operators; 4.1 Literals and Keyword Literals; 4.2 Variable References; 4.3 Constant References; 4.4 Method Invocations; 4.5 Assignments; 4.6 Operators; Chapter 5: Statements and Control Structures; 5.1 Conditionals; 5.2 Loops; 5.3 Iterators and Enumerable Objects; 5.4 Blocks; 5.5 Altering Control Flow; 5.6 Exceptions and Exception Handling; 5.7 BEGIN and END; 5.8 Threads, Fibers, and Continuations; Chapter 6: Methods, Procs, Lambdas, and Closures; 6.1 Defining Simple Methods; 6.2 Method Names; 6.3 Methods and Parentheses; 6.4 Method Arguments; 6.5 Procs and Lambdas; 6.6 Closures; 6.7 Method Objects; 6.8 Functional Programming; Chapter 7: Classes and Modules; 7.1 Defining a Simple Class; 7.2 Method Visibility: Public, Protected, Private; 7.3 Subclassing and Inheritance; 7.4 Object Creation and Initialization; 7.5 Modules; 7.6 Loading and Requiring Modules; 7.7 Singleton Methods and the Eigenclass; 7.8 Method Lookup; 7.9 Constant Lookup; Chapter 8: Reflection and Metaprogramming; 8.1 Types, Classes, and Modules; 8.2 Evaluating Strings and Blocks; 8.3 Variables and Constants; 8.4 Methods; 8.5 Hooks; 8.6 Tracing; 8.7 ObjectSpace and GC; 8.8 Custom Control Structures; 8.9 Missing Methods and Missing Constants; 8.10 Dynamically Creating Methods; 8.11 Alias Chaining; 8.12 Domain-Specific Languages; Chapter 9: The Ruby Platform; 9.1 Strings; 9.2 Regular Expressions; 9.3 Numbers and Math; 9.4 Dates and Times; 9.5 Collections; 9.6 Files and Directories; 9.7 Input/Output; 9.8 Networking; 9.9 Threads and Concurrency; Chapter 10: The Ruby Environment; 10.1 Invoking the Ruby Interpreter; 10.2 The Top-Level Environment; 10.3 Practical Extraction and Reporting Shortcuts; 10.4 Calling the OS; 10.5 Security; Colophon;