In this chapter, we are going to look into a fundamental concept called OOP. If you're coming from other OOP languages, you may be familiar with some of these concepts, but still it's important that you pay attention because Ruby embraces a very specific form of OOP compared with many other languages available today.
Before we begin, a key thing to remember is that pretty much of everything is an object in Ruby. We'll see more of it as we go. Also, I'll show some practical ways of using OOP, which hopefully will be more enlightening than the theoretical approach taught in most computer science books. In fact, teaching a practical application of OOP was one of my biggest motivators to create this course.
When I was studying development in college, I thought I learned OOP. However, what I learned in school did little to help me build...