An Interest In:
Web News this Week
- April 23, 2024
- April 22, 2024
- April 21, 2024
- April 20, 2024
- April 19, 2024
- April 18, 2024
- April 17, 2024
Learning OO Ruby
This week I started learning about OOP in Ruby. At first when the idea of classes and objects were introduced in a very round about lecture, I was a little overwhelmed. However after just reading about it, it became so much easier and intuitive. Goes to show you that sometimes you need a different explanation from a different source. I will note that the instructor said they weren't feeling well, so that is probably why the lecture was unsuccessful for myself.
First we were introduced to writer/setter and reader/getter methods along with @instance_variables. It was great to finally have a way to call a variable outside of the method without making a global variable, which I have been told to never do. Basically the writer method sets up our instance variable. It takes a value and writes it into a variable or takes in an argument and sets that argument equal to a variable. You are setting a property to take parameters that will be used in your instance variable by each instance of the class. The reader method then returns the stored information of an instance variable. This is the part that allows us to call the instance variable outside the method anywhere in our program. Initially they had us writing each step out in a very long way
ex.
class Person def initialize(name) @name = name end def name @name end def name=(new_name) @name = new_name endend
When they were teaching this I immediately thought, "This seems like such a long way to write this code. There must be another way." To my relief, there is a simpler way to write all of this. Riding in on a noble steed was the attr_accessor, attr_reader, and attr_writer. This allows you to create attributes for each instance of your objects in one line of code instead of writing each reader and writer method yourself. Wouldn't you much rather write:
class Book attr_accessor :author, :page_count, :genre attr_reader :title def initialize(title) @title=title endend
Rather than write all of this:
class Book def initialize(title) @title = title end def title @title end def author=(author) @author = author end def author @author end def page_count=(num) @page_count = num end def page_count @page_count end def genre=(genre) @genre = genre end def genre @genre endend
I think everyone would answer that the first way looks so much better and less repetitive. Here we can replace six methods and combine them into one in the attr_accessor which creates the writer and reader methods for you. Also instead of having to write:
class Book def initialize(title) @title = title end def title @title endend
You can turn the reader method into an attr_reader and have all the code fit on one line. Easy peasy. Here is another example of utilizing all of these methods and also adding in some functionality into everything too.
class Shoe attr_accessor :color, :size, :material, :condition attr_reader :brand def initialize(brand) @brand=brand end def cobble puts "Your shoe is as good as new!" @condition = "new" endend
I am excited to learn more about OOP and how to better write code.
Original Link: https://dev.to/dotnotation/learning-oo-ruby-24bf
Dev To
An online community for sharing and discovering great ideas, having debates, and making friendsMore About this Source Visit Dev To