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)

Summary

In this chapter, we covered the significance of methods, how to define them, and the different ways to send arguments to them. Indeed, methods are one of the foundational concepts of Ruby, so it's important to feel comfortable using them. The main purpose of a method is to wrap up a chunk of code to accomplish a small task. You do not want to create methods with lots of code. If you do end up with a method that has lots of code, you can refactor it into multiple, smaller methods.

Methods take arguments and can return values. As long as the method signature and return values stay the same, it makes it very easy to change the implementation later on, which is a core virtue of methods.

Methods, like atoms, are building blocks of software programming. Once we start having a lot of methods, we will want to bundle them up into a higher-order concept. In Ruby, there are two higher-order concepts in which to group methods: classes and modules. We will look at both of these...