What this book covers

Chapter 1, The Software Task Management Tool – Rake, introduces you to the basic usage of Rake and its command-line utilities. You will learn what a rake task is and how to set dependencies between rake tasks, what a default rake task is, Rakefile, and the global Rakefile. This chapter also contains information about the Rake project structure and how to organize the code.

Chapter 2, Working with Files, explains the foundational features of Rake that help us work with files. This is mandatory information because of Rake's orientation—it is built to be an automation tool. You will see that there is a special rake task for file processing called file. The main part of the chapter contains the explanation of utilities that are offered by Rake to work with the files: FileList and FileUtils. At the end, you will be given a real-world example on how to apply the acquired knowledge.

Chapter 3, Working with Rules, will show how knowing a rule task may allow you to write more robust and precise code.

Chapter 4, Cleaning Up a Build, describes one of the useful features of Rake—the capability to clean the build of your project with the clean standard task.

Chapter 5, Running Tasks in Parallel, helps us figure out how to speed up the resulting task execution with multitask. We will learn which basic problems may arise while implementing parallelism and how to avoid them.

Chapter 6, Debugging Rake Tasks, provides the basic knowledge to debug Rake projects. You will be provided with an example on how to debug rake tasks inherent to Rake techniques and also to Ruby projects in general.

Chapter 7, Integration with Rails, provides an overview of how Rake is integrated into the famous Ruby web framework, Rails. The chapter shows how to write custom rake tasks in a Rails project and run them manually or automatically on schedule.

Chapter 8, Testing Rake Tasks, details the reasons we should test rake tasks. Also, you will see an example of how to write the tests with MiniTest—a built-in Ruby test framework.

Chapter 9, Continuous Integration, briefly introduces you to Jenkins—a continuous integration software. You will see how to configure it and run rake tasks with its help.

Chapter 10, Relentless Automation, doesn't introduce any new Rake terms, but you will find useful examples of the Rake appliance by popular programs. You will be introduced to the Thor utility, which can replace Rake in some circumstances. Then we will compare both of these frameworks. Finally, we will briefly gather all the information that was provided throughout the book.