Software development requires the use of data types and flow control in order to build most applications. In this course, you can explore Ruby data types and how to manipulate them. You will learn how to work with loops, and also While, Unless, and Until statements to repeat Ruby tasks. Next, program decisions with ternary operators and case statements. Walk through data sets with sequence ranges. Hash it out with the Ruby associative array data type to store and use a built-in key-value store. Learn Ruby encoding, numerical, and bang methods. Manipulate strings. Finally, observe the question mark convention in Ruby.

Ruby is a very powerful language for web and software development. During this course, you can explore how to code in Ruby and the basic building blocks of a Ruby web application. Learn to install and configure Ruby, create and run a simple Ruby app, and operate Interactive Ruby (IRB). Recognize key Ruby identifiers, such as variables and constants. Use string, numeric, and Boolean values. Apply comments and structure to your Ruby programs, along with arithmetic and string operators, to manipulate variables. Use Ruby methods to get user input and format output to the console. Add flow control, logical operators, blocks, procs, and lambdas. Conclude by identifying how variable scope and namespaces work in Ruby.

Object-oriented programming (OOP) is a fundamental part of Ruby. This course explores OOP and how classes and objects can be used to develop more sophisticated software. Topics include the following: how to describe OOP; create a class and an object; classify objects by mutability; create and use class methods; use an external class or a module. Other areas covered are inheritance, polymorphism, encapsulation, method overriding, and overloading. You will learn how to investigate classes, and add access controls, raise and handle exceptions. Finally, as a review exercise, you will create and use classes and objects in a Ruby app.

Most applications need to use input/output operations for files and databases. Explore how Ruby accesses and manipulates files on a disk and accesses information from databases. In this course, you will see how to define and use regular expressions to manipulate strings. Use the built-in File class to open, access, and close files. See how to write code that reads and writes data to a file, and manipulates files and directories on a drive. Learn how to run the MySQL2 Ruby Gem database connector, create a client connection, and execute CRUD operations, as well as select statements and prepared statements.

Security has become a large issue with web development, and threads often provide significant performance gains over multi-core systems. During this course, you will explore software security, encryption, and how to use threads. Work with thread variables and keys. Recognize thread priorities. Use mutexes to access shared data. Conclude by spotting potential code execution timing bugs, also known as race conditions in software, and how they can cause deadlocks between threads.

Testing is a critical part of software development. This course will explore the built-in unit testing features of Ruby, as well as how to use Cucumber and behavior driven development (BDD) to help with testing Ruby code. Begin by learning how to describe unit testing. Next, create and run a test unit. From there you will identify assertion types, assert numerical values, strings with patterns, and objects. As you progress, you will learn how to install Cucumber, create a scenario project with it, and setup step definitions to run a test. Finally, as an exercise, you will use unit tests and behavior driven development to verify code functionality.