Rosetta stone? One man's hash is another's associative array is another man's dict(ionary)?
Lab: Open a file, write to it, close it, stat it & print the file info, unlink it. Handle errors.
Ruby is a very user-friendly, flexible language and fun to use. To quote from the Ruby website, Ruby is described as:
A dynamic, open source programming language with a focus on simplicity and productivity. It has an elegant syntax that is natural to read and easy to write.
The creator of Ruby, Yukihiro "Matz" Matsumoto, took various parts of his favourite languages (Perl, Smalltalk, Ada, Lisp and Eiffel) to create Ruby.
Reading and writing Ruby code is amazingly easy and fun. Once you learn the basics, it is amazing how much can be achieved in so little and concise code. A very simple example would be how iterations or loops are done in Ruby:
for(int i = 0; i < 3; ++i) {
std::cout << "Hello"
}You will see this for Ruby:
> (1..3).each { puts "Hello" }
Hello
Hello
Hello
=> 1..3
> (1..3).each do
puts "Hello again"
> end
Hello again
Hello again
Hello again
=> 1..3Ruby is a very good tool to write scripts.
Although this will be not covered here in detail, a very important thing to keep in mind is that in Ruby, everything is an object. This means that you can treat everything i.e. numbers, strings, classes, objects themselves etc as objects. Even the simplest of Ruby code will use this principle:
> 3.times { puts "hello" }
hello
hello
hello
=> 3
> "michael".capitalize
=> MichaelStrictly speaking, there will be cases where the above statement is not true in Ruby. For example, in Ruby, functions are not first class objects. In some languages like Javascript and Python, functions are first class objects. In these languages, a function can be treated like an object, i.e. they have attributes, they can be referenced and passed as parameters etc.
Ruby scripts are usually text files with .rb extension. You can run your ruby scripts as follows:
$ ruby script.rbYou can run ad-hoc Ruby code in an interactive session called the Interactive Ruby or irb in short.
$ irb
1.9.3-p448 :001>All Ruby examples in this topic will start with >, short for 1.9.3-p448 :XXX>.
It means that it is running inside an irb session. 1.9.3-p448 is the Ruby version the author was running while writing this topic.
The XXX are line numbers.
- Condtionals
- Symbols
- Blocks
- Arrays
Arrays in Ruby are ordered collections of heterogenous items. Items can be added, inserted, removed from an array. Arrays are indexed starting from 0.
> empty_ary = []
=> []
> str_ary = ["Pune", "Mumbai", "Delhi"]
=> ["Pune", "Mumbai", "Delhi"]
> num_ary = [1, 2, 3.14, 10]
=> [1, 2, 3.14, 10]
> mix_ary = ["this array has", 3, "items"]
=> ["this array has", 3, "items"]
> arr_in_ary = [1, 2, [3, 4], 5]
=> [1, 2, [3, 4], 5]
> str_ary.each { |city| puts city }
Pune
Mumbai
Delhi
=> ["Pune", "Mumbai", "Delhi"]
> num_ary[0]
=> 1
> num_ary[2]
=> 3.14Notice how arrays are heterogenous, i.e. array elements can be of different types. And an array can have array as its element.
Array objects are instances of Array class. So all instance methods are accessible to array objects. Discussing every method is beyond the scope of this topic but here are a few examples:
num_ary = [1, 2, 3.14, 10]
> num_ary.first
=> 1
> num_ary.last
=> 10
> num_ary.length
=> 4
> num_ary.empty?
=> false
> empty_ary.empty?
=> trueIt is highly recommended that one reads the Ruby Array API documentation.
- Hashes
Hashes in Ruby are ordered collection of unique keys and their values. A hash key can be of any object type. Values can be referenced by their keys.
> empty_hash = {}
=> {}
> device_hash = { samsung: "Galaxy S", apple: "iPhone"}
=> {:samsung=>"Galaxy S", :apple=>"iPhone"}
> device_hash[:samsung]
=> "Galaxy S"
> country_hash = { "America" => "Washington DC", "India" => "New Delhi", "Germany" => "Berlin" }
=> {"America"=>"Washington DC", "India"=>"New Delhi", "Germany"=>"Berlin"}Hash objects are instances of Hash class. So all instance methods are accessible to hash objects. Discussing every method is beyond the scope of this topic but here are a few examples:
> country_hash["America"]
=> "Washington"
> country_hash["Sweden"] = "Stockholm"
=> "Stockholm"
> country_hash
=> {"America"=>"Washington DC", "India"=>"New Delhi", "Germany"=>"Berlin", "Sweden"=>"Stockholm"}
> country_hash.values
=> ["Washington DC", "New Delhi", "Berlin", "Stockholm"]
> country_hash.length
=> 4
> empty_hash.empty?
=> trueIt is highly recommended that one reads the Ruby Hash API documentation.
Functions are used in Ruby to perform a specific task. In Ruby parlance, functions are generally termed as methods. Ideally, a single method should do a single task and no more. In Ruby, methods accept parameters and return a value.
A methods is enclosed inside def and the end keywords.
Parentheses is optional in Ruby for passing parameters.
The last line inside a Ruby method is returned by the method. Using return keyword is optional.
> def print_hello
puts "hello"
end
=> nil
> def sum(a, b)
a + b
end
=> nil
> def sum2 a, b
return a + b
end
=> nil
> print_hello
=> hello
> sum(2, 3)
=> 4
> sum 4, 6
=> 10As mentioned above, in Ruby, everything is an object.
Ruby also has a class called Object.
It is the default root of all Ruby objects.
Ruby objects can have attributes and methods. An instance of Object class (and in general, to create an instance of any class) can be created as follows:
> obj = Object.new
=> #<Object:0x007fcba39874b8>In Ruby, you can create your custom classes. These can used along with the classes that come with Ruby and its standard library.
Classes can have methods.
Classes also have a special method called initialize.
When a new object is created in Ruby using new method, an uninitialized object is first created and then initialize is called.
Any parameters passed to new is passed to initialize.
An instance variable in Ruby is prepended by @ symbol.
> class Student
def initialize(name, age)
@name = name
@age = age
end
def details
puts @name
puts @age
end
end
=> nil
> s1 = Student.new('Cathy', 20)
=> #<Student:0x007fcba39b78c0 @name="Cathy", @age=20>
> s1.details
Cathy
20
=> nilPython is one of the most versatile languages you're going to use in your career. You will soon see that for almost everything you want to do, Python either has a something in its standard library or an amazing third-party module that you can import in seconds. But since this is a guide for operations engineers, I'll focus the discussion more towards Python's scripting capabilities.
NOTE: Before I start, I want to point out a series of documents called Python Enhancement Proposals, PEP for short. Like their title suggests, these are potential enhancements to the Python language that have been proposed by members of the community. There's a lot of them, and you don't have to go over every single one, but you can find some very useful tips and best-practices there.
- Indentation
If you've ever written or read any code in C, C++, Java or C#, you're used to seeing curly braces ({}) pretty much everywhere.
These compiled languages use curly braces to denote the start and end of functions, loops and conditional statements.
Python, on the other hand, uses indentation to achieve the same goal. What this means is that where you see this in C++:
if (3>2) {
// Do something
}You will see this for Python:
if (3>2):
# Do somethingAs you can see, Python didn't need curly braces to signify the start or end of the if conditional; a simple indent does the job. Now when it comes to indentation, PEP8 says that you should use 4 spaces to indent your code. Keep in mind that this specifically means spaces and not tabs. Fortunately for you, most text editors today can automatically convert tabs to spaces so you don't have to hit four spaces every time you want to indent a line. However, if you are dealing with some legacy code that uses 8 space tabs, feel free to continue doing so.
Indentation is by far the most important part of python's syntax you should keep track of. If there's two lines in your code where one uses 4 spaces and another uses one 4-space tab, Python's going to give you errors when you try to run your script. Be consistent with your indentation.
- Conditionals
Conditionals refer to if, else statements where you're checking if some condition is met and then taking action based on whether it is or not.
Python supports conditionals just like any other language, with the only exception being indentation as explained above.
A complete conditional block would look like this:
# Check if the variable 'num' is greater than or less than 5
if (num > 5):
print "Greater"
else:
print "Less"You can even have 'else if' conditions, which in Python are used as elif
# Check if the variable 'num' is 2 or 5
if (num == 2):
print "Number is 2"
elif (num == 5):
print "Number is 5"
else:
print "Number is neither 2 nor 5"- Boolean Operations
Python can perform all of the standard boolean operations:and, or and not.
The operations can be used as statements of their own:
>>> (3 > 2) and (3 < 4)
True
>>> (2 > 3) or (3 > 4)
False
>>> not (2 > 3)
Trueand even in conditionals:
if not ((2 < 3) or (3 > 4)):
print "Neither statement is true"Variables in Python work just like in any other language. They can be assigned values like this:
times = 4
name = "John"They can be used in almost any statement.
>>> print times
4
>>> times + times
8You might have noticed that the variable didn't have to be created with a specific type before being assigned a value. Python allows you to assign any value to a variable and will automatically infer the type based on the value it is assigned. This means that the value assigned to a variable can be replaced with another value of a completely different type without any issues.
>>> times = 4
>>> print times
4
>>> times = "Me"
>>> print times
'Me'However, if you try to perform an operation with two variables that have values of conflicting types, the interpreter will throw an error. Take this example where I will try to add a number and a string.
>>> times = 4
>>> name = "John"
>>> times + name
Traceback (most recent call last):
File "<stdin>", line 1, in <module>
TypeError: unsupported operand type(s) for +: 'int' and 'str'As you can see here, the interpreter threw a TypeError when we tried to add an integer and a string.
But there is a way around this; Python lets you type cast variables so their values can be treated as a different type.
So in the same example, I can either try to treat the variable times as a string, or the variable name as an integer.
>>> str(times) + name
'4John'
>>> times + int(name)
Traceback (most recent call last):
File "<stdin>", line 1, in <module>
ValueError: invalid literal for int() with base 10: 'John'Here you can see that when we cast times as a string and added it to name, Python concatenated the two strings and gave you the result.
But trying to cast name as an integer threw a ValueError because 'John' doesn't have a valid base 10 representation.
Remember, almost any type can be represented as a string, but not every string has a valid representation in another type.
Out of the box, Python implements a few major data structures.
- Lists
Lists in Python are the equivalent of arrays in other languages you may be familiar with. They are mutable collections of data that you can append to, remove from and whose elements you can iterate over. Here's some common operations you can perform with lists:
>>> to_print = [1, 4]
>>> to_print.append('Hello')
>>> to_print.append('Hey')
>>> to_print
[1, 4, 'Hello', 'Hey']
>>> for i in to_print:
... print i
...
1
4
Hello
Hey
>>> to_print[1]
4
>>> to_print[-1]
'Hey'
>>> to_print[-2:]
['Hello', 'Hey']
>>> to_print.remove(4)
>>> to_print
[1, 'Hello', 'Hey']Just like arrays in other languages, Python's lists are zero-indexed and also support negative indexing.
You can use the : to get a range of items from the list.
When I ran to_print[-2:], Python returned all items from the second last element to the end.
You may have also noticed that I had both numbers and strings in the list. Python doesn't care about what kind of elements you throw onto a list. You can even store lists in lists, effectively making a 2-dimensional matrix since each element of the initial list will be another list.
- Dictionary
Dictionaries are a key-value store which Python implements by default. Unlike lists, dictionaries can have non-integer keys. Items of a list can only be referenced by their index in the list, whereas in dictionaries you can define your own keys which will then serve as the reference for the value you assign to it.
>>> fruit_colours = {}
>>> fruit_colours['mango'] = 'Yellow'
>>> fruit_colours['orange'] = 'Orange'
>>> fruit_colours
{'orange': 'Orange', 'mango': 'Yellow'}
>>> fruit_colours['apple'] = ['Red', 'Green']
{'orange': 'Orange', 'mango': 'Yellow', 'apple': ['Red', 'Green']}
>>> fruit_colours['mango']
'Yellow'
>>> for i in fruit_colours:
... print i
...
orange
mango
apple
>>> for i in fruit_colours:
... print fruit_colours[i]
...
Orange
Yellow
['Red', 'Green']You should be able to see now that dictionaries can take on custom keys. In this example, my keys were names of fruits, and the value for each key was the colour of that particular fruit. Dictionaries also don't care about what type your keys or values are, or whether the type of a key matches the type of its value. This lets us store lists as values, as you saw with the colour of apples, which could be red and green.
An interesting property about dictionaries that you might have noticed, is that iterating through the dictionary returned only the keys in the dictionary.
To see each value, you need to print the corresponding value for the key by calling fruit_colours[i] inside the for loop where i takes on the value of a key in the dictionary.
Python implements a lot more data structures like tuples, sets and dequeues. Check out the Python docs for more information these: http://docs.python.org/2/tutorial/datastructures.html
Functions in Python work exactly like they do in other languages.
Each function takes input arguments and returns a value.
The only difference is syntax, you define functions with the keyword def, and don't use curly braces like in Java, C, C++ and C#.
Instead, function blocks are separated using indentation.
>>> def square(x):
... result = x*x
... return result
...
>>> square(3)
9You can even call functions within other functions
>>> def greet(name):
... greeting = "Hello "+name+"!"
... return greeting
...
>>> def new_user(first_name):
... user = first_name
... print "New User: "+user
... print greet(user)
...
>>> new_user('Jack')
New User: Jack
Hello Jack!:) https://github.com/ziliko/code-guidelines/blob/master/Design%20an%20hypermedia(REST)%20api.md