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)

Module Methods

As we've learned so far, modules have primarily been used to add instance or class methods to other classes. You can add instance or class methods depending on whether you include or extend that module into your class. In both cases, though, the methods to be added are always defined as basic methods. This is in contrast to class methods in a class definition, which have the self. prefix for their declaration.

However, we also saw that the module callbacks were declared differently using the self. prefix. Let's see what happens if we define other methods using the self. prefix on a module like so:

module BabelFish
  def self.the_answer
    return 42
  end
end

What we're doing here is defining static module methods. These are very similar to class methods but on a module. They don't contain any state. They are called straight onto the module constant itself:

irb(main):058:0> BabelFish.the_answer...