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)

extend

In the previous section, we learned about including methods from a module for instances of a class using the include keyword. Modules can also be used to add class methods to a class. This can be accomplished by using the extend keyword.

Consider the following example:

module HelperMethods
  def attributes_for_json
    [:id, :name, :created_at]
  end
end
class User
  extend HelperMethods
end
class Company
  extend HelperMethods
end
irb(main):014:0> User.attributes_for_json
=> [:id, :name, :created_at]
irb(main):015:0> Company.attributes_for_json
=> [:id, :name, :created_at]

Here, we've defined a module called HelperMethods, which defines a single method called attributes_for_json. The intention is that these are a common set of attributes that will be used to convert objects into JSON. Because these attributes are global, in the sense that they apply to all objects, this method should be defined...