Free online book: “The Bastards Book of Ruby”, written by Dan Nguyen, is an introduction to programming and its practical uses for journalists, researchers, scientists, analysts, and anyone else whose job is to seek out, make sense from, and show the hard-to-find data.
Book Description
The first part of this book contains a bare-bones run-through of what I consider to be the most important programming fundamentals. I skip important topics so that there are fewer concepts to juggle at first. And I believe that once you get to the point that you can make code useful, you’ll naturally go back and learn those important fundamentals on your own. This book assumes you have little to no programming experience.
Table of Contents
- Installation
- Tweet Fetching
- Style, Conventions, and Debugging
- Numbers
- Strings
- Variables
- Methods
- Methods Part II: RubyGems
- If and Else
- Loops
- Collections
- Enumerables
- File input/output
- Reviewing Tweet Fetching
- Regular Expressions
- An Intro to Web Scraping
- Meet Your Web Inspector
- Inspecting a Webpage’s Traffic
- Parsing HTML with Nokogiri
- Writing a Web Crawler
- The Mechanize Gem
- SQL
- Using Non-Ruby Programs With Ruby
- Image Manipulation
- Exception and Error Handling
- Object-Oriented Concepts
- Recursion
- Comparing California’s Costs of Surgery
- Counting the Jail Logs
- Gathering the Standard & Poor’s 500 Stock Listings