Gain insights into Ruby development with 78 tasks tailored for beginners and experienced coders. Explore object-oriented concepts, debug programs, and advance your freelance coding career.

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This self-study course written as a book is your first step towards making money by coding and programming from home, and having fun doing it. You will understand how the Ruby language works, and establish a foundation for being a successful freelance developer. This course gives you not only technical detail, but presents knowledge in a friendly format, understandable by all ages, providing a thorough explanation of modern concepts for absolute beginners.

In this course you will find 78 easy to follow tasks, so even people without any programming skill can solve them. Beginners will learn how to create, debug, and understand programs in Ruby. Those who are already familiar with the language will rediscover object-oriented concepts, memory organization, find career advice, and save the planet from a nuclear apocalypse.

Ready to dive into one of the most influential and demanding third generation programming languages? Let's tune in!

The Handbook for Ruby Developers

# Code duplication vs. Object-oriented Programming
Object-oriented programming was introduced as a tool to use with growing code complexity. One of the main goals of OOP is to avoid code duplication, simplify a system, make it more maintainable, and cut down development costs.

However, there are other opinions as well. As we’ve mentioned before, some programmers think that code duplication is preferable to erroneous abstraction. It sounds reasonable because OOP is not only encapsulation, polymorphism, and inheritance. It’s also patterns and practices that have their pros and cons.

One might need not only theoretical knowledge but also significant development experience to juggle and apply OOP principles. Often, multiple programmers work on a single project at the same time. Some of them leave, and some of them join over time. Is there any guarantee that they are familiar with all of these practices and can understand the subtle details of OOP?

Since not everything is standardized, folks with decent knowledge and software development experience might have differing opinions. We end up with two camps of proponents and opponents of object-oriented programming.


> “Object-oriented programs are offered as alternatives to correct ones. Object-oriented programming is an exceptionally bad idea that could only have originated in California.” - Edsger W. Dijkstra

Edsger W. Dijkstra, one of the most influential figures of computing science’s founding generation also once said:


> “Object-oriented programming offers a sustainable way to write spaghetti code... The phrase ‘object-oriented’ means a lot of things. Half are obvious, and the other half are mistakes.”
 
Paul Graham, computer scientist,  programmer, entrepreneur, venture capitalist, and essayist, wrote in   [The Hundred-Year Language](http://www.paulgraham.com/hundred.html), 2003.

> “Object-oriented programming, whose essence is nothing more than programming using data with associated behaviors, is a powerful idea. It truly is. But it’s not always the best idea. Sometimes data is just data, and functions are just functions.”

Rob Pike, one of the Go programming language designers, has supported the above notions about object-oriented programming, as have many others.
 
The Ruby language offers fun and joy and human-friendly syntax, and intentionally simplifies the classic OOP you see in C++ and Java. While this simplicity and freedom enable programmers to write code that is often far from perfect, programmers have demonstrated that Ruby supports the object-oriented approach and can be effectively used in real business applications.

The key to efficient object-oriented software is to make the application’s design simple, not complex. It’s okay to compromise: duplication is not necessarily a bad thing. If concept and vision are still up in the air, why ignore what works for now? Understanding of object-oriented concepts often comes with time.
 
While building software, we should be mindful that code has two readers: computer and human. The computer doesn’t care about how you create a program: if it works, it works. But a person on the other side of the monitor cares what and how we create. So, try to make it simple. Making unreadable code is easy; making code readable is hard.



Learn which is better, code duplication or object-oriented programming.

Before We Begin

First Steps

Fundamentals of Ruby

Conditional Statements

Operators and Methods

Arrays

Hash

Fun with Object Oriented Programming

Debugging in Ruby

Ruby Version Manager

Testing Ruby Programs

Wrap Up!

Appendix

The truth about Object-oriented Programming

Code duplication vs. Object-oriented Programming