ruby VS Nokogiri

I use https://exercism.org/ for learning elixir and it is a great tool to start IMO. It has a track for Ruby here: https://exercism.org/tracks/ruby

Once you’re done with the odin project and want to continue learning ruby, I suggest checking out Exercism ruby track too. There is a learning track, exercises are increasing in difficulty, and you get free mentoring from Rubyists on there too.

Exercism for Ruby practice.

If you want to improve your grasp of Ruby, try The Well-Grounded Rubyist and (as someone else mentioned) Exercism.

When I was first learning Ruby, I also loved Exercism for practice.

Exercism for Ruby practice.

Ruby: - The Well-Grounded Rubyist. It covers some advanced Ruby, so it's worthwhile even if you already know some Ruby. - Exercism for Ruby practice.

For getting an overview of Ruby and Rails in two weeks, here's what I would recommend: - Watch the free Rails for Beginners videos by GoRails, and code along with them if you're so inclined. - Do some exercises on Exercism, and after each exercise be sure to look at the top solutions by other people. Use The Odin Project or your favorite Ruby tutorial as a reference for the language.

Also, the Ruby track on Exercism is great for practice.

release planning: v1.16.0 · Issue #2897 · sparklemotion/nokogiri

What's holding me back from going all in with Crystal is I have a lot of pre-existing Ruby code, and porting Ruby code to Crystal can be tricky. For example, Crystal lacks an Enumerator class (aka generators) due to captured block semantics. I also wish the shards ecosystem was a little more mature; for example there's multiple HTML parsing libraries, but none have all of the features that Ruby's Nokogiri has. For new greenfield backend projects, I would totally use Crystal.

Welcome! Ruby isn't exactly "dying", but the hype/popularity is definitely fading. This is primarily because Ruby is no longer "new", most of Ruby's popularity came from Rails, and now Rails is no longer the "new hotness". However, Ruby still has lots of awesome features and lots of awesome other libraries and frameworks, such as the new fancy irb gem that uses reline, nokogiri, chunky_png, the async gems, Dragon Ruby, SciRuby, Ronin, and the new Hanami web framework.

great for hacking at xml

Mike has worked hard over the years to have Nokogiri come with its dependencies. It does come with libxml and all that is required.

From https://nokogiri.org

> These dependencies are met by default by Nokogiri's packaged versions of the libxml2 and libxslt source code, but a configuration option --use-system-libraries is provided to allow specification of alternative library locations.

Some authors work hard to have their tools do the right thing and consistently.

If the page is rendered as html you can use Nokogiri. It has great support and is pretty easy to get started with too.

And even now, pulling in a Java-based HTML5 parser is still probably easier than re-implementing in FFI, which is why I created https://github.com/sparklemotion/nokogiri/issues/2227 and would love to have this the conversation there if possible.