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)

Introduction

In the previous chapter, we learned about the basics of object-oriented programming using Ruby. We learned that classes serve as templates for objects. We also learned that classes can also serve as templates for other classes by using the mechanism of inheritance. However, there may be situations where we might have to share code among different classes that don't really fit into an inheritance architecture. For example, we could be designing a reality simulator. In the previous chapter, we talked about how cars have four wheels, bicycles have two wheels, and boats have no wheels, but they still fall under the "Vehicles" class. Imagine that we had previously been tasked with modeling houses or places to live, which we can easily do using classes. Now we are tasked with modeling a mobile home or RV, which serves as both a vehicle and a home.

In other object-oriented languages, this problem is solved with a concept known as "multiple inheritance&quot...