Wicked Cool Ruby Scripts : Useful Scripts That Solve Difficult Problems

Wicked Cool Ruby Scripts is a compendium of scripts that will make your life easier by saving you time and solving problems. If you find yourself wasting effort and time on a task a trained monkey could do, it's time for Ruby to come to the rescue. Wicked Cool Ruby Scripts provides carefully selected Ruby scripts that are immediately useful. Learn how to streamline administrative tasks like renaming files, disabling processes, and changing permissions. After you get your feet wet creating basic scripts, author Steve Pugh will show you how to create powerful Web crawlers, security scripts, full-fledged libraries and applications, and much more. With each script you'll get the raw code followed by an explanation of how it really works, as well as instructions for how to run the script and suggestions for customizing it. Wicked Cool Ruby Scripts will save you from the tedium of repetitive tasks and give you back the time it would take to write scripts from scratch. Are you spending valuable time on work a well-trained monkey could do? If so, Wicked Cool Ruby Scripts will teach you how to automate repetitive tasks using Ruby, one of the most powerful and easy-to-use programming languages around.Wicked Cool Ruby Scripts provides 58 scripts that offer quick solutions to problems like system administration, manipulating images, and managing a website. After getting your feet wet creating simple scripts to automate tasks like file compression and decompression, you'll learn how to create powerful web crawlers, security scripts, and full-fledged libraries and applications, as well as how to:–Rename files, disable processes, change permissions, and modify users–Manipulate strings, encrypt files, and sort efficiently–Validate web links, check for orphan files, and generate forms–Mass edit photos, extract image information, and create thumbnails–Parse CSV files and scrape links, images, and pages from the WebAnd as a nod to our security friends, you'll even learn how to use Ruby to write Metasploit exploits.For each script you get the code, a discussion of how it works, and tips on how to customize it to solve real-world problems. By the time you're finished, we think you'll agree that Ruby is a wicked cool way to get things done.