How to dispel Ruby magic and understand your gems

When you build Rails apps, you’ll use piles of gems. Some of them seem totally magical! But how does that magic happen?

In most gems, there’s nothing they’re doing that you couldn’t. It’s just Ruby code. Sometimes it’s complicated Ruby code. But if you explore that code, you’ll begin to understand where that magic comes from.

Finding the source code

To understand how a gem works, you have to find its code.

If there’s a method that you want to know more about, you have an easy way to find the...