Welcome!

This website is a free online book about rebuilding Redis™* in Ruby, from scratch. It is still a work in progress, the first ten chapters are currently available, and you can see the planned table of content on the chapters page.

Start reading the first chapter below, or head to the chapters list

Who is this for?

This online book is aimed at people with some programming experience. I am assuming a reasonable level of familiarity with programming concepts such as conditions, loops, classes as well as some understanding of networking. Readers should already have heard of protocols such as HTTP and TCP and I think it would help to have already worked with those. Anyone who worked with a web application, regardless of the language, should have enough experience to read this book. If you’ve worked with a server backend in Ruby, Python, Javascript, or literally anything else, or did frontend work involving fetch and/or ajax, this should be enough!

Lastly, readers should also be familiar with threads and processes. No expertise is required, and I am far from being an expert on the topic, but if you’ve never heard of these, I would advise to glance at the linked wikipedia pages, and to potentially explore the APIs of your favorite languages. Most languages provide tools to interact with threads and processes. Ruby, which we’ll be using in this book, has a Thread class and a Process class.

I am writing this book aiming for it to be useful to five years ago me, when I had about 2 and 3 years of professional experience. I majored in computer science, so back then I had already a few years of experience with programming. That being said, a degree in CS is definitely not required to read this.

On a spectrum from beginner to expert, I would say that this book lands somewhere in the middle, but leaning towards beginner, slightly to the left, so intermediate-ish.

* Redis is a trademark of Redis Labs Ltd. Any rights therein are reserved to Redis Labs Ltd. Any use by this website is for referential purposes only and does not indicate any sponsorship, endorsement or affiliation between Redis and this website

Chapter 6 Building a Hash Table

2020-08-31

In this chapter we will write our own hash table. This will allow to remove uses of the Ruby Hash class and use our Dict class, built from scratch.

Chapter 7 Adding List Commands

2020-10-02

In this chapter we add support for a new data type, Lists. We implement all the commands related to lists, such as LPUSH, LRANGE & LLEN.

Chapter 8 Adding Hash Commands

2020-11-03

In this chapter we add support for a new data type, Lists. We implement all the commands related to hashes, such as HSET, HGET & HGETALL

Chapter 9 Adding Set Commands

2020-11-10

In this chapter we add support for one more data type, Sets. We implement most of the SET commands such as SADD, SINTER, SUNION and SDIFF

Chapter 10 Adding Sorted Sets Commands

2020-11-16

In this chapter we add support for the Sorted Set data type. We implement most of the sorted commands, such as ZADD, ZRANGE & BZPOPMAX

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