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)

2. Ruby Data Types and Operations

Activity 2.01: Dice Roller Program

Solution

  1. We begin by simulating the rolling of a dice. Ruby has an in-built rand method, which returns a random number. It takes an argument as an integer and returns a random number. Open irb and type the following:
    rand 2
  2. Now, repeat that a few more times. You'll notice the numbers you get in response are either 0 or 1, never 2. This is what 0-indexing means: the first number is always zero.
  3. The problem here is that a die never starts with zero, it starts with one. So, let's create a method for that.
  4. Open up roller.rb and add the following method to it:
    def roll
      rand(6) + 1
    end
    puts roll
  5. Run that file a few times, and you'll see that we have successfully simulated rolling a dice.
  6. Next, roll a dice with any number of sides. Continue to expand on the previous program and add an argument to this method. Open roller.rb and add the following code:
    def roll(sides...