Ruby Under a Microscope. An Illustrated Guide to Ruby Internals 1st Edition 13598

How Ruby Works Under the Hood

Ruby is a powerful programming language with a focus on simplicity, but beneath its elegant syntax it performs countless unseen tasks.

Ruby Under a Microscope gives you a hands-on look at Ruby's core, using extensive and diagrams thorough explanations to show you how Ruby is implemented (no C required skills). Author Pat Shaughnessy takes a scientific approach, laying out a series of experiments with Ruby code to take you behind the scenes of how programming languages work. You'll even find information on JRuby and Rubinius (two alternative implementations of Ruby), as well as in-depth explorations of Ruby's garbage collection algorithm.

Ruby Under a Microscope will teach you:

• How a few computer science concepts underpin Ruby's complex implementation
• How Ruby executes your code using a virtual machine
• How classes and modules are the same inside Ruby
• How Ruby employs algorithms originally developed for Lisp
• How Ruby uses grammar rules to parse and understand your code
• How your Ruby code is translated into a different language by a compiler

Covers Ruby 2.x, 1.9 and 1.8

Table of contents 

Foreword by Aaron Patterson

Acknowledgments

Вступ

Chapter 1: Tokenization and Parsing

Chapter 2: Compilation

Chapter 3: How Ruby Executes Your Code

Chapter 4: Control Structures and Method Dispatch

Chapter 5: Objects and Classes

Chapter 6: Method Lookup and Constant Lookup

Chapter 7: The Hash Table: The Workhorse of Ruby Internals

Chapter 8: How Ruby Borrowed a Decades-Old from Idea Lisp

Chapter 9: Metaprogramming

Chapter 10: JRuby: Ruby on the JVM

Chapter 11: Rubinius: Ruby Implemented with Ruby

Chapter 12: Garbage Collection in MRI, JRuby, and Rubinius