Book Image

The Ruby Workshop

By : Akshat Paul, Peter Philips, Dániel Szabó, Cheyne Wallace
Book Image

The Ruby Workshop

By: Akshat Paul, Peter Philips, Dániel Szabó, Cheyne Wallace

Overview of this book

The beauty of Ruby is its readability and expressiveness. Ruby hides away a lot of the complexity of programming, allowing you to work quickly and 'do more' with fewer lines of code. This makes it a great programming language for beginners, but learning any new skill can still be a daunting task. If you want to learn to code using Ruby, but don't know where to start, The Ruby Workshop will help you cut through the noise and make sense of this fun, flexible language. You'll start by writing and running simple code snippets and Ruby source code files. After learning about strings, numbers, and booleans, you'll see how to store collections of objects with arrays and hashes. You'll then learn how to control the flow of a Ruby program using boolean logic. The book then delves into OOP and explains inheritance, encapsulation, and polymorphism. Gradually, you'll build your knowledge of advanced concepts by learning how to interact with external APIs, before finally exploring the most popular Ruby framework ? Ruby on Rails ? and using it for web development. Throughout this book, you'll work on a series of realistic projects, including simple games, a voting application, and an online blog. By the end of this Ruby book, you'll have the knowledge, skills and confidence to creatively tackle your own ambitious projects with Ruby.
Table of Contents (14 chapters)

Ruby Methods

A method in Ruby is a set of expressions that return a value. These are similar to functions in other programming languages. Methods are defined using the def keyword, followed by the method name and then by optional parameters. The method body is enclosed between the preceding definition and the end keyword at the bottom:

def my_method
##method body
end

By convention, method names should begin with a lowercase letter, otherwise Ruby might consider it to be a constant while parsing. Also, names that have multiple words should be separated by an underscore. As in the preceding examples, the method name – my_method, has an underscore between two words.

Passing Arguments to a Method

We can pass arguments to the method on which a method has to operate. There is no limit in terms of the number of parameters that we can pass to a method. The following is a simple example of how we can create our own methods in Ruby:

def add_two_numbers a, b
  ...