Ruby Phrasebook   Jason Clinton   Essential Code and Commands   Ruby Phrasebook gives you the code you need to quickly and effectively work with Ruby, one of the fastest-growing languages in the world thanks to popular new Ruby technologies like Ruby on Rails.   Concise and Accessible Easy to carry and easy to use—lets you ditch all those bulky books for one portable pocket guide   Flexible and Functional Packed with more than 100 customizable code snippets—so you can readily code functional Ruby in just about any situation   Jason Clinton uses Ruby daily in system administration and development for Advanced Clustering Technologies, a Linux Beowulf cluster integrator. He has been working in the computer industry for more than a decade and is actively involved in the Kansas City Ruby Users Group (KCRUG), serving as administrator of the group’s web site and mailing list.   Register your book at informit.com/register for convenient access to downloads, updates, and corrections as they become available.   Programming / Ruby

Table of Contents:
Introduction 1 Audience 1 How to Use This Book 2 Conventions 2 Acknowledgments 4   1 Converting Between Types 5 Number from a String 6 Number to Formatted String 7 String to Array and Back Again 10 String to Regular Expression and Back Again 12 Array to Hash and Back Again 13 Array to Set and Back Again 15 Floating-Point, Integer, and Rational Numbers 15   2 Working with Strings 19 Searching Strings 20 Searching Strings with Regular Expressions 21 Replacing Substrings 23 Replacing Substrings using SprintF 24 Replacing Substrings using Regu 26 Working with Unicode 26 Sanitizing Input 27 Working with Line Endings 28 Processing Large Strings 30 Comparing Strings 31 Checksumming a String (MD5 or Otherwise) 31 Encrypting a String 32   3 Working with Collections 35 Slicing an Array 35 Iterating over an Array 37 Creating Enumerable Classes 38 Sorting an Array 40 Iterating over Nested Arrays 41 Modifying All the Values in an Array 42 Sorting Nested Arrays 42 Building a Hash from a Config File 44 Sorting a Hash by Key or Value 45 Eliminating Duplicate Data from Arrays (Sets) 46 Working with Nested Sets 47   4 Working with Objects 49 Inspecting Objects and Classes 50 String Presentation of Objects 50 Ruby-Style Polymorphisms (“Duck Typing”) 51 Comparing Objects 52 Serializing Objects 53 Duplication 54 Protecting an Object Instance 55 Garbage Collecting 56 Using Symbols 57   5 Working with Pipes 61 Determining Interactive Standard Pipes 62 Synchronizing STDERR with STDOUT 63 Capturing the Output of a Child Process 64 Implementing a Progress Bar 65 Creating a Secured Password Prompt 66   6 Working with Files 69 Opening and Closing Files 69 Searching and Seeking Large File Contents 70  When to Use Binary Mode (Win32) 73 Obtaining an Exclusive Lock 74 Copying, Moving, and Deleting Files 74   7 Manipulating Text 77 Parsing an LDIF 77 Parsing a Simple Config File 78 Interpolating One Text File 79 Sorting the Contents of a File 80 Processing a passwd File 81   8 Ruby One-Liners 83 Simple Search 84 Counting Lines in a File 84 Head or Tail of a File 84 MD5 or SHA1 Hash 85 Simple HTTP Fetch 86 Simple TCP Connect 87 Escaping HTML 87 Deleting Empty Directories 88 Adding Users from a Text File 88 Delete All the Files Just Extracted 89   9 Processing XML 91 Opening an XML File 92 Accessing an Element (Node) 93 Getting a List of Attributes 95 Adding an Element 96 Changing an Element’s Enclosed Text 97 Deleting an Element 98 Adding an Attribute 98 Changing an Attribute 99 Deleting an Attribute 99 Escaping Characters for XML 100 Transforming Using XSLT 100 Validating Your XML 102 A Simple RSS Parser 103   10 Rapid Applications Development with GUI Toolkits 107 A Simple GTK+ Hello World 108 Using Glade 110 A Simple Qt Hello World 115 Attaching a Signal Handler to a Qt Widget Slot 116 Using Qt Designer 118 Attaching Signal Handlers to Qt Designer Generated Code 124   11 Simple CGI Forms 127 Processing a Web Form 128 Returning Tabled Results 131 Escaping Input 134 Locking Down Ruby 136 Receiving an Uploaded File 137 Representing Data Graphically 138   12 Connecting to Databases 143 Opening (and Closing) a MySQL Database Connection 144 Creating a Table 145 Getting a List of Tables 146 Adding Rows to a Table 146 Iterating Over Queried Rows 147 Deleting Rows 147 Deleting a Table 148   13 Working with Networking and Sockets 151 Connecting to a TCP Socket 152 Running a TCP Server on a Socket 153  Serializing Objects with YAML 156 Network Objects with Distributed Ruby 158 Using Net::HTTP 159 Using Webrick 160   14 Working with Threads 163 Creating a Thread 164 Using a Timer 165 Killing a Thread 168 Synchronizing Thread Communication 169 Multithreaded Exception Gathering 172   15 Documenting Your Ruby 175 Documenting Ruby Code 176 Typographic Conventions Used 177 Overriding Method Signatures in Documentation 179 Hiding a Module, Class, or Method 180 Providing Program Usage Help 180 Generating HTML Documentation 182 Generating and Installing Documentation for ri 183   16 Working with Ruby Packages 185 Installing a Module 187 Removing a Module 188 Searching for a Module 188 Updating Modules 188 Examining a Module 189 Packaging Your Module with Hoe 189 Creating a Simple Test Case 190 Distributing Your Module on RubyForge 191 Making Rakefile Standalone 192   Index 195