内容简介

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 diagrams and thorough explanations to show you how Ruby is implemented (no C skills required). 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

No programming language needs to be a black box. Whether you’re already intrigued by language implementation or just want to dig deeper into Ruby, you’ll find Ruby Under a Microscope a fascinating way to become a better programmer.

Covers Ruby 2.x, 1.9 and 1.8

作品目录

Foreword by Aaron Patterson

Acknowledgments

Introduction

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 Idea from 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

Index