Table of contents
These are the 33 chapters that I've so far started writing, divided into 4 sections. I've included a factbox for each chapter to indicate how complete it is.
The Fundamentals section is probably best read chronologically. If you already know how to program, the Supplemental chapters and Projects cover a wide range of real-world use cases that might interest you.
Please read the About page for more details on the progress of this book.
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The Fundamentals
This section is a very abridged introduction to computer science and contains the bare minimum that I think you need to learn before being able to see programming as "not magic." The first chapter is an installation guide and an introduction to the command line. The chapter after that exist solely as a copy-and-paste exercise, so you can at least experience how easy it is to run code.
Then it's the basics: numbers, strings, variables, methods, loops and more. At a surface level, Ruby is a language. And just as in French, before you you can converse and flirt in it, you need to learn about conjugation, tenses, and how to form sentences like "Je ne suis pas allé à la bibliothèque pour manger le fromage."
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Installation
Install Ruby, learn about the command line, and say Hello to the world- • Troubleshoot First
- • The Command Line
- • Installing Ruby
- • Testing Your Ruby Installation
- • Write and Run Your First Program
- • Get a Text Editor Designed for Coding
- • How to Run a Program in Your Text Editor
- • Executing Ruby scripts from the command-line
- • Troubleshooting
Status Decent draft Words 3,595 Lines of code 5 Exercises 0 Pictures 29 -
Tweet Fetching
A walkthrough of the concepts covered in this book with the Twitter API.- • Making a "scarf"
- • What this code does
- • Setup your workspace
- • Downloading Wikipedia pages
- • Variables and methods
- • Writing and reading to files
- • Collections and Loops
- • Tweet Fetching
- • Parsing the Tweets
- • On to the theory
Status Decent draft Words 4,754 Lines of code 792 Exercises 0 Pictures 12 -
Style, Conventions, and Debugging
Some basics on reading, annotating, and debugging code.- • General program structure
- • Comments
- • Whitespace
- • Variations in style
- • Debugging with a deep breath
Status Draft Words 1,795 Lines of code 206 Exercises 0 Pictures 3 -
Numbers
Ruby's basic data objects for counting and math- • Number classes
- • Operators
- • Number methods
Status Draft Words 666 Lines of code 56 Exercises 1 Pictures 1 -
Strings
Letters, words, paragraphs, books. And quotes.- • Text, words, characters
- • String operations and methods
- • Mixing datatypes
- • Combining strings with interpolation
- • "Escape" with backslash
- • String substitution
Status Draft Words 1,731 Lines of code 105 Exercises 3 Pictures 2 -
Variables
Labels for pointing to your data.- • Explaining variables with analogies
- • Basic usage of variables
- • Assignments
- • References, references, references
- • A visual guide to variables
- • The classic variable swap
Status Draft Words 4,624 Lines of code 310 Exercises 6 Pictures 13 -
Methods
How to do things using other programmers' code.- • Hello again, "Hello World"
- • Anatomy of a method
- • Scope
- • Method design
- • Syntax and shortcuts
- • The open method
- • Methods and classes
Status Draft Words 3,186 Lines of code 533 Exercises 8 Pictures 4 -
Methods Part II: RubyGems
Ruby's convenient distribution system for getting everyone else's convenient code- • Installing Gems With RubyGems
- • Fetch data from the Internet with the Rest-Client gem
- • Application Programming Interfaces (APIs)
- • Google's Geocoding API
- • Crack XML with the Crack Gem
Status Decent draft Words 1,391 Lines of code 54 Exercises 2 Pictures 4 -
If and Else
Breaking out from a narrow, straight path of program flow.- • The if
- • Booleans: the truth about true and false
- • Going elsewhere
- • Variations on if
- • Logic and flow
- • The FizzBuzz Game
Status Draft Words 2,316 Lines of code 243 Exercises 4 Pictures 1 -
Loops
How to do thousands of operations with a few lines of code.- • The for Statement
- • Other loops
- • Rubyists prefer each
Status Draft Words 1,110 Lines of code 114 Exercises 4 Pictures 1 -
Collections
How to store lists of data.- • Arrays
- • Other array methods
- • Working with partial arrays
- • Hashes
- • Nested collections
- • Revisiting the crack gem
Status Draft Words 3,347 Lines of code 487 Exercises 11 Pictures 2 -
Enumerables
Transforming and sorting collections- • The each
- • Transforming arrays with map
- • The select and inject methods
Status Draft Words 1,355 Lines of code 248 Exercises 7 Pictures 1 -
File input/output
Reading from and writing directly to files- • Creating a file and writing to it
- • Reading from a file
- • Closing files
- • File existence and properties
Status Decent draft Words 1,778 Lines of code 198 Exercises 6 Pictures 4 -
Reviewing Tweet Fetching
(An outdated section, but useful for reviewing)- • The Code
- • Initializing gems and variables
- • Following Twitter's API
- • GET with RestClient
- • Use crack to read the XML response
- • Request the Tweets, Repeat
- • There's a gem for that
- • Fundamentals and more
Status Deprecated Words 1,339 Lines of code 120 Exercises 0 Pictures 1 -
Supplementals
These chapters aren't necessary in understand the foundations of programming, but they're critical to making your programming knowledge useful in real-world applications.
Some of these concepts have little to do with programming, so it's possible to read their chapters without intending to learn programming. Regular expressions, in particular, are valuable to anyone who has to deal with cleaning and verifying datasets. I've devoted several chapters to web-scraping on the assumption that some readers may have little working knowledge about HTML, Javascript, and the other underlying web technologies.
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Regular Expressions
An essential mini-language for text-matching and manipulation- • Try Regexes in Your Text Editor
- • Introduction to regex syntax
- • Ruby and regexes
- • More regex patterns
- • Get a cheat sheet
Status Incomplete draft Words 5,824 Lines of code 183 Exercises 7 Pictures 7 -
An Intro to Web Scraping
A simplifed overview of how data gets to and from the web browser- • Scraping: The big picture
- • The scraping roadmap
Status Draft Words 2,172 Lines of code 10 Exercises 0 Pictures 6 -
Meet Your Web Inspector
The built-in tool for to easily examine the structure of webpages.- • Your browser's web inspector
- • Use the Inspector to read HTML
Status Decent draft Words 1,292 Lines of code 10 Exercises 0 Pictures 11 -
Inspecting a Webpage's Traffic
Using the web inspector to watch a webpage's incoming and outgoing traffic.- • Activate your network panel
- • Inspecting a webpage's assets
- • Inspecting the requests
- • Inspecting the server's response
Status Decent draft Words 2,500 Lines of code 21 Exercises 0 Pictures 23 -
Parsing HTML with Nokogiri
Quickly extract data from raw HTML with the Nokogiri gem- • Nokogiri
- • Nokogiri and CSS selectors
- • Nokogiri and your web inspector
Status Decent draft Words 1,629 Lines of code 120 Exercises 2 Pictures 3 -
Writing a Web Crawler
Combining HTML parsing and web inspection to programmatically navigate and scrape websites.- • Why not wget?
- • Move Link-to-Link (Wikipedia)
- • Change URL parameters (Data.gov)
- • Detecting redirects (Defense.gov)
- • POST requests (FEC.gov)
- • Use the Mechanize gem
- • Unscrapable sites
- • Poking around
Status Draft Words 4,601 Lines of code 460 Exercises 0 Pictures 28 -
The Mechanize Gem
Automate the annoying parts of web-scraping- • Simplify the scraping of complex websites
- • Mechanize in action
Status Stub Words 451 Lines of code 57 Exercises 0 Pictures 1 -
SQL
An introduction to relational databases and their query languages- • Data-crunching without databases
- • Getting started with SQLite
- • SQL syntax
- • Beyond SELECT
- • Using SQLite3 with Ruby
Status Draft Words 4,810 Lines of code 257 Exercises 5 Pictures 16 -
Using Non-Ruby Programs With Ruby
Don't throw away the programs you've been using. Ruby can play with non-Ruby applications.- • Ruby, Excel, and Google Docs
- • Ruby and the Command Line
- • Ruby and Python
- • Auto-optimized-optical character recognition
Status Rough draft Words 3,282 Lines of code 194 Exercises 1 Pictures 21 -
Image Manipulation
How to use ImageMagick and the RMagick gem to process and interpret images and photos.- • ImageMagick and the RMagick gem
- • Opening and saving images
- • Image alterations
- • Pixel operations
- • Drawing
- • Applications
Status Stub Words 1,967 Lines of code 200 Exercises 3 Pictures 20 -
Design and Theory
This section contains some of the important computer science and software engineering concepts that I largely skipped over in the beginning to soften the learning curve.
This section is very incomplete and contains few working examples. I'm experimenting with different ways of introducing the topics. The main point is to make you at least aware of them. The topics are deep and complex and can occupy weeks of a class curriculum. Even if this section were more complete, you should seek multiple sources and explanations.
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Exception and Error Handling
How a program recovers from unexpected (and expected) errors- • Demonstrating exceptions
- • The Begin...Rescue block
- • Flow of exception handling
- • Exception and Error Classes
- • Further reading
Status Stub Words 1,570 Lines of code 172 Exercises 0 Pictures 5 -
Object-Oriented Concepts
A primer on object-oriented design and using it to organize your code.- • A Cinematic Metaphor
- • Object-oriented syntax
- • Fleshing out the OOP with movies
Status Stub Words 1,785 Lines of code 190 Exercises 0 Pictures 4 -
Recursion
A divide-and-conquer design pattern- • The King and his rocks
- • Applications (under construction)
Status Stub Words 1,312 Lines of code 41 Exercises 0 Pictures 0 -
The Projects
Even though The Bastards Book of Ruby was going to just be a list of programming projects and snippets, this section is the least complete and consistent. Some portions have been written before I had decided to write all the other sections, so they contain thorough step-by-step instructions. Other portions – because I assume you've gone through the previous sections, or just out of laziness – do little more than describe the point of the code.
Though many of the Fundamental and Supplementary chapters contain useful code examples, the Projects section attempts to walk through not just the code for specific situations, but the reasons behind exploring a dataset and the possible avenues of analyses and investigation.
The code is a little more complex – and, at times, obtuse – but is meant to be readable by not-yet accomplished programmers. However, readers who are already skilled programmers may find useful insights or ideas to take on.
As of the first release of this book, I've only had time to draft just a few of the project walkthroughs that I have so far planned. This section will be the most added-upon over time.
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Comparing California's Costs of Surgery
How to collect and analyze the costs of California's reported surgical procedures.- • The Concepts
- • The Context
- • The Steps
Status Decent draft Words 716 Lines of code 0 Exercises 0 Pictures 0 -
CA Surgeries: Mechanize
Use Mechanize to navigate and scrape the Common Surgeries Database- • Trying out the Common Surgeries website
- • Inspecting the Common Surgeries website
- • The Code
- • The Fetching Code: All Together
Status Decent draft Words 2,367 Lines of code 251 Exercises 0 Pictures 7 -
CA Surgeries: Parsing and Storing
Using Nokogiri to parse the collected HTML pages and storing into a SQLite database- • The Steps
- • Parsing with Nokogiri
- • Storing the Data with SQLite
- • Code Comparison: SQL vs. Ruby
Status Decent draft Words 1,173 Lines of code 157 Exercises 0 Pictures 2 -
CA Surgeries: Visualization
Using Google Charts to visualize the costs of surgery in California- • Hacking Visualizations
- • Intro to the Google Charts API
- • Queries and graphing
- • Why coding makes data easier
Status Draft Words 2,284 Lines of code 148 Exercises 0 Pictures 17 -
Counting the Jail Logs
Who is in jail? And why?- • Scraping with Mechanize
- • Parsing the data
- • Data normalization
- • Sample analyses and visualizations
- • Limitations of the data
Status Draft Words 3,344 Lines of code 331 Exercises 0 Pictures 30 -
Gathering the Standard & Poor's 500 Stock Listings
A financially-themed demo of HTML parsing, SQL, and visualization- • Getting historical stock data from Yahoo
- • Storing stock data into SQLite
- • Visualization with Google Charts
Status Draft Words 105 Lines of code 45 Exercises 0 Pictures 1