Crowdfund is a Ruby program developed based on Pragmatic Studio’s Ruby Programming hands-on video course, and distributed as a Ruby gem.

This program has been developed using all the strengths of Ruby including the following.

Ruby Programming Environment

• Installing Ruby on your favorite operating system (free exercise)

• Running Ruby using the interactive Ruby shell (irb) and writing Ruby program files

• Using Ruby’s documentation system to get help

• Installing external Ruby libraries using RubyGems

• Troubleshooting common problems

Ruby Language Constructs

• Expressions and variables

• Numbers, string, and symbols (free video & exercise)

• Loops and conditional expressions

• Arrays and hashes (free video & exercise on hashes)

• Classes, modules, and structs

Object-Oriented Programming

• Using built-in Ruby classes

• Defining your own classes with state and behavior (free video & exercise)

• Creating unique objects

• Telling objects what to do by calling methods

• Modeling class-level inheritance relationships

• Sharing code with mixins

Object-Oriented Design Principles

• Encapsulation

• Separation of concerns

• Polymorphism

• Don’t Repeat Yourself

• Tell, Don’t Ask

Blocks and Iterators

• Calling built-in methods that take blocks

• Writing your own methods that yield to blocks

• Implementing custom iterators

• Effectively using blocks in your programs

Organizing Ruby Code

• Creating a Ruby project structure

• Separating source files for easier reuse and testing

• Namespacing to avoid naming clashes

• Input/Output

• Reading data from files

• Writing data to files

• Creating an interactive console prompt

• Handling command-line input

Unit Testing

• Writing and running unit tests with RSpec

• Test-driven development and the red-green-refactor cycle

• Stubbing methods to control tests

• Refactoring code, safely!

Distribution

• Conforming to RubyGems conventions

• Writing a GemSpec

• Building a RubyGem

• Publishing a RubyGem to a public server

Ruby Programming Idioms