When you open the base.rb file, the first things you should notice are the dependencies
or requirements. Surprisingly, there are only four dependencies listed here: base64, yaml, set,
and active_record/deprecated_finders. Let??™s briefly look at what each of these gives us.
base64: This library contains methods that are designed to handle base64 encoding and
decoding of binary data; base64 is the default representation most databases use for handling
binary data.
yaml: YAML stands for ???yet another markup language??? and is often used in configuration
files throughout Ruby. Active Record also allows you to set configuration values via YAML files.
Serialization and the to_yaml method also rely on the YAML library. We cover YAML in more
detail in Chapters 6 and 7.
set: The set library adds functionality to manage collections of unordered, unique values.
Its documentation bills it as ???a hybrid of Array??™s intuitive inter-operation facilities and
Hash??™s fast lookup.???
active_record/deprecated_finders: This simply provides backward compatibility for
older, and now deprecated, Active Record finder methods.
Pages:
407
408
409
410
411
412
413
414
415
416
417
418
419
420
421
422
423
424
425
426
427
428
429
430
431