Description

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 Web

And 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.

Steve Pugh has been a programmer for over a decade. He has worked as a software analyst for a banking software company, run a large-scale network operations center (overseeing 7,000 users and 130 network technicians), and is currently doing security research for the US government. Much of this book was written while Pugh was working for the US government in Northern Iraq.