Show HN: Ruby One-Liners Cookbook(learnbyexample.github.io)

191 pointsby asicsp6 lat temu36 comments

learnbyexample.github.io

https://learnbyexample.github.io/learn_ruby_oneliners/one-liner-introduction.html

36 comments

asicsp6 lat temu

Ruby is based on programming languages like Perl, Smalltalk, Eiffel, Ada, and Lisp. Many cli options are same as Perl and behave similarly too. While Ruby would be slower compared to sed/awk/perl, I find it a pleasure to use Ruby's built-in array/enumerable methods, blocks, etc.

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The post links to the web version of the ebook. You can download pdf/epub versions using the links below (free until this Sunday)

* Ruby one-liners cookbook: https://gumroad.com/l/ruby-oneliners or https://leanpub.com/ruby-oneliners

* Bundle of one-liners and Regexp: https://gumroad.com/l/ruby-textprocessing or https://leanpub.com/b/ruby-textprocessing

Also, my 6 book bundle (regular expressions and grep/ripgrep/sed/awk) is priced $5 until Sunday:

* https://gumroad.com/l/regex/off10

* https://leanpub.com/b/regex/c/off10

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Writing a book: is it worth it? (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24628549)

For my unique circumstances, emphatic yes. I left my job more than 6 years back for various reasons. I tried a few things that didn't work out.

Before I left the job, I had been conducting yearly workshops at my college for electronics students to get started with command line, vim, perl/python, etc. For reference material, I used provide a few slides. As something to keep me mentally occupied, I started with word document, then moved to GitHub/Gitbook. My awk tutorial (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=15549318) hit front page and combined with sharing on other social sites, I started getting decent traffic to my GitHub repos. My primary aim with these resource materials was to share with workshop students. Since I had failed to earn outside of workshops and my savings were dwindling, I tried putting donation button on GitHub (sponspor wasn't introduced at that time). Didn't work out.

Finally, about two years back, kinda like a last try before I was forced to look for a job again, I self-published Ruby Regexp book. Didn't earn much, but couple of months later, I used this material to publish Python regex book. This was received much better, got me about $250 in initial sales.

I live alone in outskirts of a city in India, and my modest lifestyle needs about $150 per month to cover my living expenses. Last year, ebook sales and workshops nearly covered my expenses. This year, pandemic put a stop to my workshops. But, ebook sales has more than covered for it so far.

I have a sustainable income again. About 20k free copies given away and all my books are now free to read online. It is worth it.

tomcam6 lat temu

Thanks for a detailed, honest, and inspiring share. That’s a pretty amazing story.

jmarchello6 lat temu

I recently picked Ruby up again after about a year of JS and Python. I instantly fell in live again due to how simple it is to do anything with Ruby.

Rails is a breath of fresh air after trying to maintain hand-rolled solutions. The productivity gains are incredible. With Ruby 3 coming soon it seems like the performance of the language has drastically improved. I’m excited to see ruby continue to flourish.

pantulis6 lat temu

It's hard not to fall in love with Ruby. Since 2010 I've also dabbed into Javascript, Go, Elixir, Rust --work in progress, damned lifetimes!-- but as the song goes, Ruby was my first programming love and will be my last.

pantulis6 lat temu

And mind you, i've seen and written my good share of crap Ruby code! It's not about the quality of the code or the fit-for-purposeness of the language or platform, it's about the joy of writing code in it. Totally subjective.

RangerScience6 lat temu

Ruby is the only language that says, "nevermind all that other stuff - Developer Happiness." (And, "Matz Is Nice So We Are Nice")

It comes through in so many tiny ways!

sdwisely6 lat temu

the next release of Crystal will also be 1.0 too.

https://crystal-lang.org/

faitswulff6 lat temu

Crystal is a great language that has learned a lot from Ruby. I'm excited to see where it goes. I think one area where it doesn't measure up to Ruby, however, is Windows support, which they've decided to forgo for the 1.0 milestone [0].

That said, I'm excited to pick up Crystal someday. What are some good niches you've found for it?

[0]: https://crystal-lang.org/2020/03/03/towards-crystal-1.0.html...

radiospiel6 lat temu

I remember they said that already 2 years ago. :(

block_dagger6 lat temu

Crystal has no metaprogramming. Lang is far less useful than Ruby imo, doesn’t deserve equal comparison.

1337_d00dZ6 lat temu

It has metaprogramming via macros: https://crystal-lang.org/reference/syntax_and_semantics/macr...

block_dagger6 lat temu

True, but one of the selling points of Ruby to begin with is runtime metaprogramming. Sure, it should generally be discouraged, but when it's heavily utilized by ecosystems like Rails, it becomes a primary feature that macros do not adequately address.

brigandish6 lat temu

Are you saying it's a primary feature for Rails or for Ruby? I can't think of an example where it's a primary feature for a user of Rails but I usually avoid it in favour of better tools so I might not know of them. Perhaps you know of some?

sourdoughness6 lat temu

Rails leans on meta programming for a lot of its magic (though less so than it used to in early versions). You don’t generally use it as a user of Rails, though.

brigandish6 lat temu

Then I don't see how they're any better than macros in that situation.

realusername6 lat temu

It does have metaprogramming, only at compile time. Crystal metaprogramming is very advanced as well, you could even create methods dynamically from a JSON file if you wanted to.

burlesona6 lat temu

Very similar to this idea, simply using ‘irb’ for one-off data munging and simple automations is very handy. That’s one of my go to tools when I am not sure exactly what I want to do with the data, and being able to poke at the intermediate steps as I transform it is handy. If I then come up with a pipeline that is useful, it only takes a minute to copy paste what I figured out in IRB to a file and save it as an executable script for future use.

mberning6 lat temu

I do this all the time. People are always amazed at what can be accomplished in 5 minutes in an irb session. It can be your ‘secret weapon’.

aledalgrande6 lat temu

One feature I REALLY miss in Node is a great REPL like irb/rails c

revscat6 lat temu

It’s fascinating to me that the mindshare that was once taken up by Perl seems to slowly but surely be replaced by Ruby. This is a positive, IMO. Compared to Perl, Ruby is easier to write and — more importantly — read.

jfhufl6 lat temu

I get a lot of mileage out of

    command | ruby -e 'ARGF.each { |line| #do stuff with line }'

3pt141596 lat temu

Same, but I was doing it so often I made an alias to a script in my dotfiles folder.

   ruby_code = ARGV[0]

    loop do
      line = $stdin.gets()
      l = line
      break unless line
      line.chomp!
      final_ruby_code = 'puts "' + ruby_code + '"'
      eval(final_ruby_code, binding())
    end

Invoked like this:

    echo foo | rg "The double do: #{l * 2}"

To print:

   The double do: foofoo

Extremely useful when data munging around.

dorianmariefr6 lat temu

mine is called ruby-each-line:

    #!/usr/bin/env ruby

    if ARGV.size != 1
      puts "USAGE: ruby-each-line CODE"
      exit
    end

    STDIN.each_line do |line|
      line = line.strip
      l = line
      eval(ARGV.first)
    end

brigandish6 lat temu

You can cut that back a bit with the '-n' switch. Using an example from this helpful article[1] on some of the switches Ruby inherited from Perl:

    ps ax | ruby -e 'ARGF.each { |line| puts line.split.first if line =~ /top/ }'

becomes:

    ps ax | ruby -ne 'puts $_.split.first if $_ =~ /top/'

It even squashes the extra newline the ARGF version prints out first.

[1] https://robm.me.uk/ruby/2013/11/20/ruby-enp.html

asicsp6 lat temu

Well, my book linked in this post is all about using Ruby from cli, with Perl like switches.

    ps ax | ruby -ane 'puts $F[0] if /top/'

brigandish6 lat temu

Nice, I didn't know about autosplit.

jrumbut6 lat temu

Ruby, like Perl, is really built to be a part of a *nix system and has some bash elements (like special variables).

It's a natural fit for one-liners.

oogway80206 lat temu

Ruby brings me joy of programming. Like this morning, doing a report for year, month and getting the last day of the month is absolute genius: Date.new(year, month, -1) # wow

save_ferris6 lat temu

Just FYI, the code element color is impossible to see when the page loads its dark theme. Otherwise, looks great.

asicsp6 lat temu

I'm using mdBook [0] and haven't changed the default theme settings. Could you clarify that by 'code element' you mean the code blocks or inline code? I think you mean inline code for 'Coal' and 'Navy' themes, because for other combinations I'm able to see them properly.

[0] https://github.com/rust-lang/mdBook

save_ferris6 lat temu

Both inline and code blocks appear with black text and a black background.

asicsp6 lat temu

I took screenshots: https://drive.google.com/drive/folders/1bxJdI6z3XPNtRDCt1Vva...

If these are readable, then may be your browser+os combo or something else might be the issue? Could you try on a different browser if possible?

save_ferris6 lat temu

Firefox on MacOS causes the issue, Chrome works fine.

asicsp6 lat temu

Thanks, probably this issue? https://github.com/rust-lang/mdBook/issues/1304

bdcravens6 lat temu

Some of these one-liners are clocking in at around 120 characters.

asicsp6 lat temu

Towards the end, multiline commands are more common. I'm using "one-liners" to invoke a mental image like grep/sed/awk/perl one-liners.