MacAdie Web Blog

This chapter is about inheritance, modules and mixins. To make a subclass: class Child < Parent end You can invoke parent class methods with “super”, just like in Java. You will usually want to call “super” in the initialize method if you are inheriting. On page 95, it would be nice if the “private” keyword [...]

This chapter starts out with arrays (square brackets) and hashes (curly braces), which are important to know. It says that blocks when combined with collections are good iterators. The elements in arrays and hashes can be any type. Using different methods, arrays can be different data structures: sets, queues, dequeues, FIFO queues, instead of using [...]

This chapter was pretty easy. Mostly about objects and variables. So what is an attribute? It seems like it is another name for an instance variable. They start with an “at” symbol. I am still not too clear what a symbol is. I did not pay too much attention to the part on protected methods. [...]

Here are some notes on Chapter 2 of the Pickaxe book.   Single quoted strings take less processing, no interpolation Return value of a method is the last statement, so you may not always want/need to put a “return” statement in there. Local variables, method parameters and method names all start with lower case or [...]

I have finished the first chapter of the Pickaxe book. The first chapter was no big deal for me. It was about getting and installing Ruby and a few basic commands. I have used rvm to install Ruby on my Ubuntu laptop, and Rails Installer to install Ruby and Rails on my Windows laptop.

One of my plans outside of Code Academy is to go through the Ruby “Pickaxe Book” by Dave Thomas. Someone gave me a copy of the edition for Ruby 1.9. I will write a short post about each chapter as I finish them. Image from Wikipedia