Book Image

Comprehensive Ruby Programming

By : Jordan Hudgens
Book Image

Comprehensive Ruby Programming

By: Jordan Hudgens

Overview of this book

Ruby is a powerful, general-purpose programming language that can be applied to any task. Whether you are an experienced developer who wants to learn a new language or you are new to programming, this book is your comprehensive Ruby coding guide. Starting with the foundational principles, such as syntax, and scaling up to advanced topics such as big data analysis, this book will give you all of the tools you need to be a professional Ruby developer. A few of the key topics are: object-oriented programming, built-in Ruby methods, core programming skills, and an introduction to the Ruby on Rails and Sinatra web frameworks. You will also build 10 practical Ruby programs. Created by an experienced Ruby developer, this book has been written to ensure it focuses on the skills you will need to be a professional Ruby developer. After you have read this book, you will be ready to start building real-world Ruby projects.
Table of Contents (20 chapters)

What does a Ruby method return?

Learning what a method returns is critical in any programming language. Ruby specifically has a unique way of working with returned values. In this section, you are going to learn what a method returns.

I'm going to use the same method we created in the last section, which is as follows:

def baseball_team_list 
p ["A's", "Angels", "Astros"]
end

baseball_team_list

In other traditional programming languages, you have to explicitly use the return word to tell the method to return the values you want. For example, you would have to type something like this:

def second_baseball_team_list 
return p ["A's", "Angels", "Astros"]
end

second_baseball_team_list

Now, if you hit run, this code will get executed without any errors. However, Ruby does not need an explicit declaration...