Ruby Advanced
The metaprogramming that still catches experienced Rubyists: singleton classes, method_missing, refinements, prepend, and the two searches behind constant lookup. Every snippet is one you could be handed in a code review.
Who it is for
Confident; wants the traps.
For someone confident in the language who wants the traps, the edge cases and the interview questions.
You will get the most out of it if you have written Ruby recently enough to read it without effort, and have been surprised by it at least once. If you are picking the language up for the first time, start with Ruby Essentials and come back to this one.
It is also built for interview preparation: the questions are the ones that get asked because they separate people who have read the documentation from people who have hit the behaviour in production.
How long it takes
90 graded questions at roughly 45 seconds each is about 68 minutes of answering in total.
At the default five questions a day, and because the session mixes in your other courses, expect around 18 days — call it 3 weeks — to see everything once, plus a few weeks of thinning reviews after that before it is all mastered.
A question is mastered on the third correct answer, once the gap between reviews has grown past a week — so a course cannot be finished in a weekend however long you sit with it.
Question mix
- 60 multiple choice
- 10 concept cards
- 10 predict the output
- 10 put it in order
- 10 matching questions
Syllabus
What you will be asked about
-
01
Singleton Classes
Explain where a method defined on one object actually lives, and read a singleton class's ancestors.
-
02
define_method
Choose between def and define_method by what each one can see and how strictly it takes arguments.
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03
method_missing
Build a ghost-method object that stays honest about what it responds to.
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04
The Ancestor Chain
Predict method lookup after include, prepend and extend by reading the ancestors list.
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05
Refinements
Scope a monkey patch to one file or one class body and say where it will not apply.
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06
Module#module_function
Say what module_function copies, what it makes private, and when extend self is the better tool.
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07
Instance Variables by Reflection
Read and write instance variables through reflection and predict what an unset one returns.
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08
Class Variables
Predict how a @@variable is shared across a class, its subclasses and its includers.
-
09
Constant Lookup
Resolve a constant by searching lexical scope before the ancestor chain, and spot when compact class definitions break it.
-
10
Closures, Currying and ObjectSpace
Control what a block captures, build partially applied procs with curry, and enumerate live objects.
8 more topics, and all 90 questions
Ruby Advanced is a Pro course. One subscription opens it and every other course in the catalogue, including the ones still being written.
A question from this course
Singleton Classes
What does this print?
a = "x"
b = "x"
def a.shout
upcase + "!"
end
p [a.shout, b.respond_to?(:shout), a.class]Show the answer
A ["X!", false, String]
You may have expected b to gain the method too, because def a.shout looks like reopening String. It is not: the method went into a's own singleton class, so b never sees it. And a.class still reports String - class deliberately skips the singleton class, which is why a patched object is indistinguishable from the outside.
The rest of the track
Ruby at every depth
Ruby Essentials
The behaviour underneath the friendly syntax. Only nil and false are falsy, symbols are not strings, string literals are mutable, and a method returns its last expression whether or not you meant it to.
Ruby Core
Where Ruby trips people who use it daily. Blocks against procs against lambdas, the ancestor chain and method lookup, the three kinds of equality, and what happens when two names point at the same object.
Ruby Data & Collections
Array, Hash, Set and Enumerable in earnest. Bang methods that return nil, Hash defaults that share one object between every key, fetch against [], grouping and tally, and lazy enumerators that are not always cheaper.
Ruby Errors & Edge Cases
Exceptions and their edges. Rescue ordering, StandardError against Exception, what an ensure does to a return value, retry, and the difference between catch/throw and raising at all.
Ruby Standard Library
The library people reimplement by hand: Struct and Data, Set, the Comparable and Enumerable mixins, Forwardable, JSON, Digest and BigDecimal. Ten places where a built-in already does the job, and one behaviour in each that is not what you assumed.
Ruby Idioms & Pitfalls
The Ruby people write out of habit that is wrong or merely un-Ruby: for loops that leak their variable, and versus &&, unless with an else, ||= on a false value, map followed by compact, and rescuing Exception. Ten habits, and the behaviour that punishes each one.
Ruby Performance
What actually costs in MRI: object allocation, frozen and deduplicated strings, symbol keys, array and string growth, lazy enumerators, and the generational collector. Every claim is one you can measure with GC.stat rather than guess at.
Ruby Testing
What a test actually asserts, and where that claim is weaker than it looks. Argument order and failure messages, the three kinds of equality, exceptions, isolation between examples, and the difference between a failure and an error.
Ruby Interview Questions
The Ruby questions interviewers actually ask, and the answers that need a reason attached. Proc and lambda return semantics, the ancestor chain, mixins, duck typing, shared references, symbols, method_missing, memoisation and Enumerable built by hand.
Start Ruby Advanced
in tomorrow’s session.
Enrol and this course joins your daily five, mixed in with everything else you are studying — 90 questions spread over about 18 days rather than dropped on you at once.
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