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The Ruby Standard Library contains larger pieces of functionality and must be specifically imported in to your programs. Some examples of standard library are utility classes for working with dates and times, serialization, network access and more.
[MUSIC]
0:00
While Ruby Core contains modules and
classes,
0:04
the Ruby Standard library contains
larger pieces of functionality and
0:07
must be specifically
imported into your programs.
0:12
Some examples of standard library are
utility classes for working with dates and
0:16
times, serialization,
network access, and more.
0:21
We could do a whole course on every
piece of the standard library.
0:26
However, we're just going to look at some
of the different pieces of functionality
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available today.
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What we see here is
the Ruby Standard Library Documentation.
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Now, the main panel says just a little bit
about how the documentation was generated.
0:40
And gives thanks to the people
who helped make it happen.
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On the left side of
the main documentation,
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you'll find the table of contents.
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This lists every available package in the
standard library and is sorted by letter.
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If we click into a package, we'll get the
documentation format that we're used to
0:59
for other classes and modules.
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Most documentation for items in
the standard library will be split up
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among different classes and modules.
1:12
This naming scheme is common in Ruby and
encourages separation of concerns when
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coding projects larger than
just a few methods or files.
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Right now, I've loaded up the
documentation for CSV, which stands for
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comma separated values.
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This is a common format which seems
easy to implement programmatically, but
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is actually quite involved,
which is why there's a library for it.
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Now that we click into
the standard library for
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CSV, we'll see a bunch
of different classes.
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Most commonly, the documentation for
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what we want will have
the same name as the package.
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In the CSV example, I'm gonna click
on the top level CSV class again.
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When I do that, we get a description
of what the package does,
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followed by some code
examples of how it can work.
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We can generally use these code examples
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as a guide to accomplish what
we want to in our programs.
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On the left side, we have the usual
method list that the class supports.
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In larger packages, like we find in the
standard library, we'll also see a name
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space section which will show any other
sub classes that this library has.
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Finally, if we scroll down we can see any
modules that are included with this class,
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and also included in the library.
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Some packages like this one for
CSV may also have notes,
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gotchas, warnings or
other things to keep in mind when coding.
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This one contains notes on how different
character and codings are handled.
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And also a note that we
may find bugs in the code,
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as well as where to report the issue.
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When we get a little further into the
documentation, we'll also see a list of
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constants in the class before
the rest of the methods are listed.
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One thing that's interesting to note
about packages in the standard library,
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is that they have to be
explicitly required.
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For example, if I open up irb and
try to access the CSV class,
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I'll get an error saying that
there's an uninitialized constant.
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In order to use it,
I'll have to explicitly require CSV.
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Once I do that,
I'll have access to the CSV class.
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If I click back into the rest of
the standard library documentation,
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we can see that there's a wealth
of functionality available to us.
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The Benchmark module for
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example, will allow us to measure
the time it takes our code to run.
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This can help us if we're trying to
optimize different pieces of code, and
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get an idea of where the bottlenecks
might be in our programs.
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The CGI library is larger library for
working with low level web requests and
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has several sub classes inside of it.
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If we go back even further,
the FileUtils module
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gives us a platform agnostic way to
work with files and directories.
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We can do things like change and list
directories, copy, move files, and more.
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As we keep scrolling through
the documentation for
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the standard library,
we'll see different sections.
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For example, Net/HTTP,
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the Net HTTP module can be
used to consume APIs, and
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also fetch and
work with webpages programatically.
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It's a good idea to read over the classes
and libraries in the standard library.
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By being familiar with
the standard library,
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you'll have a leg up on programming, and
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not be tempted to re-implement these
pieces of functionality on your own.
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Some classes to be familiar
with are forwardable,
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observer, prettyprint, optparse, and more.
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Using the documentation link below,
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try reading through some of the standard
library documentation now, and
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practice with some of these classes
on your own using workspaces.
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