Using Libraries

Being able to stand on the shoulders of giants is one of the great advantages when we pick a programming language that has a great ecosystem, and an even more awesome community:

Being faced with a certain task that we want to accomplish we can often look for other peoples’ solutions, and simply re-use and build on their code.

In the chapter Using Libraries you have learned that Ruby comes with lots of things available as soon as your program starts, but others need to be loaded using the method require. For example we did require "digest" and from then on there’s a class Digest::SHA2 defined, which provides some handy tools (methods) that we really wouldn’t want to write ourselves.

But how exactly does that work?

In order to understand how external code is loaded in maybe 99% of all Ruby applications out there nowadays you’ll need to understand the following concepts which we’ll walk through:

• The Ruby Standard Library
• Rubygems and Bundler
• The Ruby load path