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)

Including Modules

Modules, in their simplest definition, are a way to wrap code into a bundle so the code can be reused within other code without needing to be duplicated.

This definition sounds very similar to that of a Ruby class. Specifically, what makes a Ruby module distinct is that it cannot be instantiated into an object like a class. It can, however, be included in a class so the methods and variables defined in the module are accessible by the class. This refers to the mixin property of modules. Also, the methods and variables in a class can also be accessible to the code in the module. Essentially, when a module is included in a class, Ruby treats that code as if it were written right into that class. All the previous concepts we learned about classes and inheritance still apply to the module code when called.

For instance, if you call a module method from inside a class, that module method calls super and it will call the super class method of the class that the module...