About the Book

This book is made out of nearly 100% recycled blog posts. It collects Reg "Raganwald" Braithwaite's celebrated series of essays about Combinatory Logic, Method Combinators, and Ruby Meta-Programing into a convenient and inexpensive e-book.

“O_O... it seems there's no limit in the joy of coding and thinking in #ruby”—Edoardo Rossi

“Working through @raganwald's combinator book. I WROTE A THRUSH! Love the book.”—Corey Haines

“I bought it a month ago and it is brilliant! It let me connect my functional PL class to Ruby.”—Zach Abbott

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- 0.1 The MIT License
- 0.2 Preface
1 Introduction
2 Kestrels
- 2.1 Object initializer blocks
- 2.2 Inside, an idiomatic Ruby Kestrel
- 2.3 The Enchaining Kestrel
- 2.4 The Obdurate Kestrel
- 2.5 Kestrels on Rails
- 2.6 Rewriting “Returning” in Rails
3 The Thrush
- 3.1 Let
4 Songs of the Cardinal
- 4.1 Building a Cardinal in Ruby
5 Quirky Birds and Meta-Syntactic Programming
- 5.1 A limited interpretation of the Quirky Bird in Ruby
- 5.2 Embracing the Quirky Bird
- 5.3 Andand even more
6 Aspect-Oriented Programming in Ruby using Combinator Birds
- 6.1 Giving methods advice
- 6.2 The super keyword, perhaps you’ve heard of it?
- 6.3 The Queer Bird
7 Mockingbirds
- 7.1 Duplicative Combinators
- 7.2 Recursive Lambdas in Ruby
- 7.3 Recursive Combinatorics
- 7.4 Recursive Combinators in Idiomatic Ruby
- 7.5 The Mockingbird
8 Refactoring Methods with Recursive Combinators
- 8.1 Divide and Conquer
- 8.2 The Merge Sort
- 8.3 Separating Declaration from Implementation
- 8.4 Practical Recursive Combinators
- 8.5 Spicing things up
- 8.6 Building on a legacy
- 8.7 Seriously
- 8.8 Separating Implementation from Declaration
- 8.9 A Really Simple Recursive Combinator
9 You can’t be serious!?
- 9.1 String to Proc
- 9.2 The Message
10 The Hopelessly Egocentric Book Chapter
- 10.1 Object-oriented egocentricity
11 Bonus Chapter: Separating Concerns in Coffeescript using Aspect-Oriented Programming
12 Appendix: Finding Joy in Combinators
- 12.1 Languages for combinatorial logic
- 12.2 Concatenative languages
13 Appendix: Source Code
- 13.1 kestrels
- 13.2 thrushes
- 13.3 the cardinal
- 13.4 quirky birds
- 13.5 bluebirds
14 About The Author
- 14.1 contact

About the Author

Reg “raganwald” Braithwaite

When he's not shipping CoffeeScript, JavaScript, Ruby, and Java applications scaling out to millions of users, Reg "Raganwald" Braithwaite creates programming libraries such as Allong.es, Method Combinators, Katy, JQuery Combinators, YouAreDaChef, andand, and others.

He writes primarily about programming. Find out more on his home page.