www.it-ebooks.info

www.it-ebooks.info

Learn to Program
Second Edition
Chris Pine

The Pragmatic Bookshelf
Raleigh, North Carolina Dallas, Texas

www.it-ebooks.info

Pragmatic Bookshelf
Many of the designations used by manufacturers and sellers to distinguish their products are claimed as trademarks. Where those designations appear in this book, and The Pragmatic Programmers, LLC was aware of a trademark claim, the designations have been printed in initial capital letters or in all capitals. The Pragmatic Starter Kit, The Pragmatic Programmer, Pragmatic Programming, Pragmatic Bookshelf and the linking g device are trademarks of The Pragmatic Programmers, LLC. Every precaution was taken in the preparation of this book. However, the publisher assumes no responsibility for errors or omissions, or for damages that may result from the use of information (including program listings) contained herein. Our Pragmatic courses, workshops, and other products can help you and your team create better software and have more fun. For more information, as well as the latest Pragmatic titles, please visit us at http://www.pragprog.com Copyright © 2009 Chris Pine. All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form, or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise, without the prior consent of the publisher. Printed in the United States of America. ISBN-10: 0-9766940-4-2 ISBN-13: 978-1-934356-36-4 Printed on acid-free paper. P1.1 printing, March 2009 Version: 2009-7-22

www.it-ebooks.info

Contents
Preface to the Second Edition Introduction What Is Programming? . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Programming Languages . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . The Art of Programming . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 1 Getting Started 1.1 Windows . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 1.2 Mac OS X . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 1.3 Linux . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Numbers 2.1 Did It Work? . . . . . 2.2 Introduction to puts 2.3 Integer and Float . . 2.4 Simple Arithmetic . 2.5 A Few Things to Try vii x xii xiii xiv 1 2 4 7 9 9 10 10 10 12 14 15 16 16 19 23 23 25 26 26 27 28 28

2

. . . . .

. . . . .

. . . . .

. . . . .

. . . . .

. . . . .

. . . . .

. . . . .

. . . . .

. . . . .

. . . . .

. . . . .

. . . . .

. . . . .

. . . . .

. . . . .

. . . . .

. . . . .

. . . . .

. . . . .

. . . . .

3

Letters 3.1 String Arithmetic . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 3.2 12 vs. ’12’ . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 3.3 Problems . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Variables and Assignment Mixing It Up 5.1 Conversions . . . . . . 5.2 Another Look at puts 5.3 The gets Method . . . 5.4 Did It Work? . . . . . . 5.5 The chomp Method . . 5.6 A Few Things to Try . 5.7 Mind Your Variables .

4 5

. . . . . . .

. . . . . . .

. . . . . . .

. . . . . . .

. . . . . . .

. . . . . . .

. . . . . . .

. . . . . . .

. . . . . . .

. . . . . . .

. . . . . . .

. . . . . . .

. . . . . . .

. . . . . . .

. . . . . . .

. . . . . . .

. . . . . . .

. . . . . . .

. . . . . . .

. . . . . . .

www.it-ebooks.info
CONTENTS v

6

More About Methods 6.1 Fancy String Methods 6.2 A Few Things to Try . 6.3 Higher Math . . . . . . 6.4 More Arithmetic . . . 6.5 Random Numbers . . 6.6 The Math Object . . . Flow Control 7.1 Comparison Methods 7.2 Branching . . . . . . . 7.3 Looping . . . . . . . . 7.4 A Little Bit of Logic . . 7.5 A Few Things to Try .

. . . . . .

. . . . . .

. . . . . .

. . . . . .

. . . . . .

. . . . . .

. . . . . .

. . . . . .

. . . . . .

. . . . . .

. . . . . .

. . . . . .

. . . . . .

. . . . . .

. . . . . .

. . . . . .

. . . . . .

. . . . . .

. . . . . .

. . . . . .

30 32 36 36 37 38 40 41 41 43 48 51 57 59 61 64 65 67 71 72 74 76 80 82 82 88 90 90 97 98 98 99 100 101 103 105 107 110

7

. . . . .

. . . . .

. . . . .

. . . . .

. . . . .

. . . . .

. . . . .

. . . . .

. . . . .

. . . . .

. . . . .

. . . . .

. . . . .

. . . . .

. . . . .

. . . . .

. . . . .

. . . . .

. . . . .

. . . . .

8

Arrays and Iterators 8.1 The Method each . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 8.2 More Array Methods . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 8.3 A Few Things to Try . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Writing Your Own Methods 9.1 Method Parameters . . 9.2 Local Variables . . . . . 9.3 Experiment: Duby . . . 9.4 Return Values . . . . . 9.5 A Few Things to Try . .

9

. . . . .

. . . . .

. . . . .

. . . . .

. . . . .

. . . . .

. . . . .

. . . . .

. . . . .

. . . . .

. . . . .

. . . . .

. . . . .

. . . . .

. . . . .

. . . . .

. . . . .

. . . . .

. . . . .

10 There’s Nothing New to Learn in 10.1 Recursion . . . . . . . . . . . 10.2 Rite of Passage: Sorting . . . 10.3 A Few Things to Try . . . . . 10.4 One More Example . . . . . . 10.5 A Few More Things to Try . .

Chapter 10 . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .

. . . . .

. . . . .

. . . . .

. . . . .

. . . . .

. . . . .

. . . . .

. . . . .

11 Reading and Writing, Saving and Loading, Yin and... 11.1 Doing Something . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 11.2 The Thing About Computers... . . . . . . . . . . . . 11.3 Saving and Loading for Grown-Ups . . . . . . . . . 11.4 YAML . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 11.5 Diversion: Double-Quoted Strings . . . . . . . . . . 11.6 Back to Our Regularly Scheduled Programming . . 11.7 Renaming Your Photos . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 11.8 A Few Things to Try . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .

. . . . . . . .

. . . . . . . .

. . . . . . . .

www.it-ebooks.info
CONTENTS vi

12 New Classes of Objects 12.1 The Time Class . . . . . . . . 12.2 A Few Things to Try . . . . . 12.3 The Hash Class . . . . . . . . 12.4 Ranges . . . . . . . . . . . . . 12.5 Stringy Superpowers . . . . . 12.6 A Few More Things to Try . . 12.7 Classes and the Class Class

. . . . . . .

. . . . . . .

. . . . . . .

. . . . . . .

. . . . . . .

. . . . . . .

. . . . . . .

. . . . . . .

. . . . . . .

. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .

. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .

. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .

. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .

. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .

. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .

. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .

112 113 115 115 116 118 120 121 122 123 123 124 127 128 133 134 135 139 140 142 145 145 146 146 147 149 150 151 152 154 155 162 165 169 180 187 193 199 206

13 Creating New Classes, Changing Existing Ones 13.1 A Few Things to Try . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 13.2 Creating Classes . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 13.3 Instance Variables . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 13.4 new vs. initialize . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 13.5 Baby Dragon . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 13.6 A Few More Things to Try . . . . . . . . . . . 14 Blocks and Procs 14.1 Methods That Take Procs . . . . . . . . . 14.2 Methods That Return Procs . . . . . . . . 14.3 Passing Blocks (Not Procs) into Methods 14.4 A Few Things to Try . . . . . . . . . . . . 15 Beyond This Fine Book 15.1 irb: Interactive Ruby . . . . . . . . 15.2 The PickAxe: Programming Ruby . 15.3 Ruby-Talk: The Ruby Mailing List 15.4 Tim Toady . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 15.5 THE END . . . . . . . . . . . . . . A Possible Solutions A.1 Exercises from A.2 Exercises from A.3 Exercises from A.4 Exercises from A.5 Exercises from A.6 Exercises from A.7 Exercises from A.8 Exercises from A.9 Exercises from A.10 Exercises from A.11 Exercises from Index Chapter Chapter Chapter Chapter Chapter Chapter Chapter Chapter Chapter Chapter Chapter 2 . 5 . 6 . 7 . 8 . 9 . 10 11 12 13 14 . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .

www.it-ebooks.info

Preface to the Second Edition
I ran into an old friend the other day. It’s been more than a decade since last we spoke. As we were catching up, I mentioned, “Oh, and I sort of accidentally wrote a book a few years back.” After all, I didn’t really mean to write this book. Once upon a time, some of us Ruby fans were chatting about teaching programming, and I had a few things to say about it. Not much. Just a few things. Somehow the conversation migrated onto a wiki somewhere, and I wrote up a few of my ideas. After a while, it seemed like I was the only one writing, so I moved some of my thoughts to my own website. Suddenly I realized it was starting to look suspiciously like a tutorial. And not a very good one, I have to say. Well, my initial attempts seemed pretty good to me, and I got positive feedback from the other Ruby programmers who saw it. But then again, we all knew how to program. When I actually showed the tutorial to a nonprogrammer (my extremely patient wife), it was clear that there was still much work to be done. So, I reworked it and rewrote some sections, and it became...better. Not great, though. It took several more iterations before it was really usable. But by then I was hooked: I was going to make this tutorial the best programming tutorial ever! Fortunately, it got plenty of use, I got plenty of feedback, and it continued to improve. (I could never have done it on my own. If it weren’t for all the comments and questions, this whole thing never would have gone anywhere.) And so it went, for about three years. Conversation moves to wiki. Wiki migrates to tutorial. Tutorial becomes book. And at every step, I’m answering as many emails as I can, noting where people are having the most trouble, learning why they are having trouble, and smoothing the way for the next programmers-to-be. At every step, it’s getting just a tiny bit better.

www.it-ebooks.info
P REFACE TO THE S ECOND E DITION viii

As it turns out, 5,000 tiny bits really add up. And now that it’s done, I’m convinced I learned more from this book than anyone else did—not about how to program, of course, but about the way we learn programming and about learning in general. Perhaps the most important principle in teaching programming is to separate concepts as much as possible so that the programmer-to-be has to learn only one concept at a time. This is much easier said than done, though. There were just so many things that I was used to, so I often didn’t realize when I was introducing a new concept. With some practice, though, and much help from aspiring programmers, it became easier as I went along. Naturally, I tried to cover more basic concepts before working up to more complex concepts. I was amazed, however, at how little of a precedence hierarchy there really is. Many of the ideas could be taught meaningfully independently of the others. Eventually, I just had to pick an order, and I tried to arrange things so that each new section was motivated by the previous one. Another principle I realized early on is the importance of teaching only one way to do something. It’s an obvious benefit in a book for people who have never programmed before. For one thing, one way to do something is easier to learn than two. Perhaps the more important benefit, though, is that the fewer things you teach a new programmer, the more creative and clever they have to be with the primitive bits they do know. Since so much of programming is creative problem solving, it’s crucial to encourage this as soon as possible. I tried to piggyback programming concepts onto concepts the new programmer already has and to present ideas in such a way that their intuition will carry the load, rather than the tutorial. Object-oriented (OO) programming lends itself to this quite well. I was able to begin referring to “objects” and different “kinds of objects” pretty early in the tutorial, slipping those phrases in at the most innocent of moments. I wasn’t saying anything like “everything in Ruby is an object” or “numbers and strings are kinds of objects,” because, beloved as they are in the Ruby community, these statements really don’t mean anything to a new programmer. Instead, I would talk about strings (not “string objects”), and sometimes I would refer to “objects,” simply meaning “the things in these programs.” The fact that all these things in Ruby are objects (in the OO sense) made this sort of sneakiness on my part work so well.

www.it-ebooks.info
P REFACE TO THE S ECOND E DITION ix

Although I wanted to avoid needless OO jargon, I did try to make sure that if you do need to learn a word, you learn the right one. (You don’t want to have to learn it twice, right?) So, I called them “strings,” not “text.” Methods needed to be called something, so I just called them “methods.” As far as the exercises are concerned, I think I came up with some good ones, but you can never have too many. Examples were much easier: just come up with some joke that you can relate to the concept you’re explaining, and there you go! But exercises...they were hard. Honestly, I bet I spent half of my time just trying to come up with fun, interesting exercises. Almost everything I came up with was just boring, and boring exercises absolutely kill any desire to program. On the other hand, the perfect exercise creates an itch you can’t help but scratch. I did my best, but I don’t think any of them are perfect. I hope you will come up with your own programming tasks or even just variations on those given here. I remember someone telling me that they had added a bunch of code to their orange tree program so that it would actually draw an ASCII-art orange tree! It grew as the tree got older and even displayed the correct number of oranges! That’s amazingly cool! A lot of software grows in this way: small, simple beginnings, with tiny improvements here or an interface overhaul there, until you have something much larger than what you started with. I guess books can grow this way, too.

Chris Pine
January 2009 Oslo, Norway

www.it-ebooks.info

Introduction
I vividly remember writing my first program. (My memory is pretty horrible; I don’t vividly remember many things, just things like waking up after oral surgery or watching the birth of our children or that time I was trying to flirt with this girl and she told me that my zipper was down or when I set my shoes on fire in my middle-school gym class or writing my first program...you know, things like that.) I suppose, looking back, that it was a fairly ambitious program for a newbie (twenty or thirty lines of code, I think). But I was a math major, after all, and we are supposed to be good at things like “logical thinking.” So, I went down to the Reed College computer lab, armed only with a book on programming and my ego, sat down at one of the Unix terminals there, and started programming. Well, maybe “started” isn’t the right word. Or “programming.” I mostly just sat there, feeling hopelessly stupid. Then ashamed. Then angry. Then just small. Eight grueling hours later, the program was finished. It worked, but I didn’t much care at that point. It was not a triumphant moment. It has been more than a decade, but I can still feel the stress and humiliation in my stomach when I think about it. Clearly, this was not the way to learn programming. Why was it so hard? I mean, there I was, this reasonably bright guy with some fairly rigorous mathematical training—you’d think I would be able to get this! And I did go on to make a living programming, and even to write a book about it, so it’s not like I just “didn’t have what it took” or anything like that. No, in fact, I find programming to be pretty easy these days, for the most part. So, why was it so hard to tell a computer to do something only mildly complex? Well, it wasn’t the “mildly complex” part that was giving me problems; it was the “tell a computer” part.

www.it-ebooks.info
I NTRODUCTION xi

In any communication with humans, you can leave out all sorts of steps or concepts and let them fill in the gaps. In fact, you have to do this! We’d never be able to get anything done otherwise. The typical example is making a peanut butter and jelly sandwich. Normally, if you wanted someone to make you a peanut butter and jelly sandwich, you might simply say, “Hey, could you make me a peanut butter and jelly sandwich?” But if you were talking to someone who had never done it before, you would have to tell them how: 1. Get out two slices of bread (and put the rest back). 2. Get out the peanut butter, the jelly, and a butter knife. 3. Spread the peanut butter on one slice of bread and the jelly on the other one. 4. Put the peanut butter and jelly away, and take care of the knife. 5. Put the slices together, put the sandwich on a plate, and bring it to me. Thanks! I imagine those would be sufficient instructions for a small child. Small children are needlessly, recklessly clever, though. What would you have to say to a computer? Well, let’s just look at that first step: 1. a) b) c) d) e) ... Locate bread. Pick up bread. Move to empty counter. Set down bread on counter. Open bag of bread.

But no, this isn’t nearly good enough. For starters, how does it “locate bread”? We’ll have to set up some sort of database associating items with locations. The database will also need locations for peanut butter, jelly, knife, sink, plate, counter.... Oh, and what if the bread is in a bread box? You’ll need to open it first. Or in a cabinet? Or in your fridge? Perhaps behind something else? Or what if it is already on the counter? You didn’t think of that one, did you? So, now we have this: • Initialize item-to-location database. • If bread is in bread box: – – – – Open bread box. Pick up bread. Remove hands from bread box. Close bread box.

www.it-ebooks.info
W HAT I S P ROGRAMMING ? xii

• If bread is in cabinet: – Open cabinet door. – Pick up bread. – Remove hands from cabinet. – Close cabinet door. ... And on and on it goes. What if no clean knife is available? What if there is no empty counter space at the moment? And you’d better pray to whatever forces you find comfort in that there’s no twist-tie on that bread! Even steps such as “open bread box” need to be explained...and this is why we don’t have robots making sandwiches for us yet. It’s not that we can’t build the robots; it’s that we can’t program them to make sandwiches. It’s because making sandwiches is hard to describe (but easy to do for smart creatures like us humans), and computers are good only for things that are (relatively) easy to describe (but hard to do for slow creatures like us humans). And that is why I had such a hard time writing that first program. Computers are way dumber than I was prepared for.

What Is Programming?
When you teach someone how to make a sandwich, your job is made much easier because they already know what a sandwich is. It is this common, informal understanding of “sandwichness” that allows them to fill in the gaps in your explanation. Step 3 says to spread the peanut butter on one slice of bread. It doesn’t say to spread it on only one side of the bread or to use the knife to do the spreading (as opposed to, say, your forehead). You assume they just know these things. Similarly, I think it will help to talk a bit about what programming is in order to give you a sort of informal understanding of it. Programming is telling your computer how to do something. Large tasks must be broken up into smaller tasks, which must be broken up into still smaller tasks, down until you get to the most basic tasks that you don’t have to describe—the tasks your computer already knows how to do. (These are really basic things such as arithmetic or displaying some text on your screen.) My biggest problem when I was learning to program was that I was trying to learn it backwards. I knew what I wanted the computer to

www.it-ebooks.info
P ROGRAMMING L ANGUAGES xiii

do and tried working backward from that, breaking it down until I got to something the computer knew how to do. Bad idea. I didn’t really know what the computer could do, so I didn’t know what to break the problem down to. (Mind you, now that I do know, this is exactly how I program these days. But it just doesn’t work to start out this way.) That’s why you’re going to learn it differently. You’ll learn first about those basic things your computer can do (a few of them) and then find some simple tasks that can be broken down into a few of these basic things. Your first program will be so easy that it won’t even take you a minute.

Programming Languages
To tell your computer how to do something, you must use a programming language. A programming language is similar to a human language in that it’s made up of basic elements (such as nouns and verbs) and ways to combine those elements to create meaning (sentences, paragraphs, and novels). There are many languages to choose from (C, Java, Ruby, Perl...), and some have a larger set of those basic elements than others. Ruby has a fine set and is one of the easiest to learn (as well as being elegant and forgiving and the name of my daughter, and so forth), so we’ll use that one. Perhaps the best reason for using Ruby is that Ruby programs tend to be short. For example, here’s a small program in Java: public class HelloWorld { public static void main(String []args) { System.out.println("Hello World"); } }

And here’s the same program in Ruby: puts 'Hello World'

This program, as you might guess from the Ruby version, just writes Hello World to your screen. It’s not nearly as obvious from looking at the Java version.

www.it-ebooks.info
T HE A R T OF P ROGRAMMING xiv

How about this comparison: I’ll write a program to do nothing! Nothing at all! In Ruby, you don’t need to write anything at all; a completely blank program will work just fine. In Java, though, you need all this: public class DoNothing { public static void main(String[] args) { } }

You need all that just to do nothing, just to say, “Hey, I am a Java program, and I don’t do anything!” So, that’s why we’ll use Ruby. (My first program was not in Ruby, which is another reason why it was so painful.)

The Art of Programming
An important part of programming is, of course, making a program that does what it’s supposed to do. In other words, it should have no bugs. You know all this. However, focusing on correctness, on bug-free programs, misses a lot of what programming is all about. Programming is not just about the end product; it’s about the process that gets you there. (Anyway, an ugly process will result in buggy code. This happens every time.) Programs aren’t just built in one go, like a bridge. They are talked about, sketched out, prototyped, played with, refactored, tuned, tested, tweaked, deleted, rewritten.... A program is not built; it is grown. Because a program is always growing and always changing, it must be written with change in mind. I know it’s not really clear yet what this means in practical terms, but I’ll be bringing it up throughout the book. Probably the first, most basic rule of good programming is to avoid duplication of code at all costs. This is sometimes called the DRY rule: Don’t Repeat Yourself. I usually think of it in another way: a good programmer cultivates the virtue of laziness. (But not just any laziness. You must be aggressively, proactively lazy!) Save yourself work whenever possible. If making a few

www.it-ebooks.info
T HE A R T OF P ROGRAMMING xv

changes now means you’ll be able to save yourself more work later, do it! Make your program a place where you can do the absolute minimum amount of work to get the job done. Not only is programming this way much more interesting (it’s very boring to do the same thing over and over and over...), but it produces less buggy code, and it produces it faster. It’s a win-win-win situation. Either way you look at it (DRY or laziness), the idea is the same: make your programs flexible. When change comes (and it always does), you’ll have a much easier time changing with it. Well, that about wraps it up. Looking at other technical books I own, they always seem to have a section here about “Who should read this book” or “How to read this book” or something. Well...I think you should read it, and front-to-back always works for me. (I mean, I did put the chapters in this order for a reason, you know.) Anyway, I never read that crap, so let’s program!

www.it-ebooks.info

Chapter 1

Getting Started
We’ll be using three main tools when we program: a text editor (to write your programs), the Ruby interpreter (to run your programs), and your command line (which is how you tell your computer which programs you want to run). Although there’s pretty much just one Ruby interpreter and one command line, there are many text editors to choose from—and some are much better for programming than others. A good text editor can help catch many of those “stupid mistakes” that beginner programmers make...oh, all right, that all programmers make. It makes your code much easier for yourself and others to read in a number of ways: by helping with indentation and formatting, by letting you set markers in your code (so you can easily return to something you are working on), by helping you match up your parentheses, and most important by syntax coloring (coloring different parts of your code with different colors according to their meanings in the program). You’ll see syntax coloring in the examples in this book. With so many good editors (and so many bad ones), it can be hard to know which to choose. I’ll tell you which ones I use, though; that will have to be good enough for now. : ) But whatever you choose as your text editor, do not use a word processor! Aside from being made for an entirely different purpose, they usually don’t produce plain text, and your code must be in plain text for your programs to run. Since setting up your environment differs somewhat from platform to platform (which text editors are available, how to install Ruby, how your command line works...), we’ll look at setting up each platform covered in this book, one at a time.

www.it-ebooks.info
W INDOWS 2

1.1 Windows
First, let’s install Ruby. Go get the One-Click Installer from the website (http://rubyinstaller.rubyforge.org/wiki/wiki.pl) by clicking Download and then clicking the highest-numbered version of Ruby you see there (version 1.8.6-26 as of this writing). When you run it, it will ask you where you want to install Ruby and which parts of it you want installed. Just accept all the defaults. Now let’s make a folder on your desktop in which you’ll keep all of your programs. Right-click your desktop, select New, and then select Folder. Name it something truly memorable, such as programs. Now doubleclick the folder to open it. To make a blank Ruby program, right-click in the folder, select New, and then select Ruby Program. You can rename the file if you want, but make sure to keep the .rb file extension, since that’s what tells your computer this is a Ruby program (and not an email or a picture of Mr. Bean or something). Now, when you installed Ruby, you also installed a really nice text editor called SciTE (which is what I use when I’m on Windows or Linux). To use it to edit your new program, right-click your program, and select Edit. (When you get to the next chapter, you’ll even write a program here, but for now let’s just wait.) To actually run your programs, you’ll need to go to your command line. In your Start menu, select Accessories, and then choose Command Prompt. You’ll see something like this:
Microsoft Windows XP [Version 5.1.2600] (C) Copyright 1985-2001 Microsoft Corp. C:\Documents and Settings\chris>_

Now some of you overachievers may have noticed that you can run your programs straight from SciTE by pressing F5 . However, this will not work for any but the simplest of programs. You will need to use the command line, so you might as well get used to it now.

(That cursor at the end will probably be blinking; it’s your computer’s way of asking, “What would you like?”) So, here we are, at the command line, which is your direct connection to the soul of your computer. You want to be somewhat careful way down here, since it’s not too hard to do Bad Things (things such as erase everything on your computer). But if you don’t try anything too wacky, you should be fine.

Boy, when I was a kid, all we had was the command line! None of these fancy buttons or mice. We typed! Up hill! In the driving snow! And we liked it!

www.it-ebooks.info
W INDOWS 3

So, here you are, basically just staring at your computer naked. It would only be polite to say “hello” at this point, so type echo hello on the command line, and press Enter . Your computer should reply with a friendly hello as well, making your screen look something like this:
C:\Documents and Settings\chris>echo hello hello C:\Documents and Settings\chris>_

And your cursor is blinking again in a “What’s next?” sort of way. Now that you’re acquainted, ask it to make sure Ruby is installed properly and to tell you the version number. We do this with ruby -v:
C:\Documents and Settings\chris>ruby -v ruby 1.8.6 (2007-09-24 patchlevel 111) [i386-mswin32] C:\Documents and Settings\chris>_

Great! All we have left now is to find your programs folder through your command line. It’s on your desktop, so we need to go there first. We do this with cd desktop:
C:\Documents and Settings\chris>cd desktop C:\Documents and Settings\chris\Desktop>_

So, now we see what the C:\Documents and Settings\chris was all about. That’s where we were on the command line. But now we’re on the desktop (or C:\Documents and Settings\chris\Desktop according to the computer). Why cd? Well, way back in the olden days, before CDs (when people were getting down to eight-track cassettes and phonographs and such) and when command lines roamed the earth in their terrible splendor, people didn’t call them folders on your computer. After all, there were no pictures of folders (since this was before people had discovered crayons and Photoshop), so people didn’t think of them as folders. They called them directories. So, they didn’t “move from folder to folder.” They “changed directories.” But if you actually try typing change_directory desktop all day long, you barely have time to get down to your funky eight-track cassettes; so, it was shortened to just cd.

www.it-ebooks.info
M AC OS X 4

If you want to go back up a directory, you use cd ..:
C:\Documents and Settings\chris\Desktop> cd .. C:\Documents and Settings\chris>_

And to see all the directories you can cd into from where you are, use dir /ad:
C:\Documents and Settings\chris> dir /ad Volume in drive C is System Volume Serial Number is 843D-8EDC Directory of C:\Documents and Settings\chris 07.10.2005 07.10.2005 02.09.2005 04.10.2005 07.10.2005 15.08.2005 10.02.2005 05.09.2005 15.08.2005 10.02.2005 07.10.2005 10.02.2005 10.02.2005 25.02.2005 25.02.2005 14:30 14:30 10:45 16:19 14:24 13:17 02:50 13:17 14:14 02:50 15:23 02:50 02:50 14:57 12:07 <DIR> <DIR> <DIR> <DIR> <DIR> <DIR> <DIR> <DIR> <DIR> <DIR> <DIR> <DIR> <DIR> <DIR> <DIR> . .. Application Data Cookies Desktop Favorites Local Settings My Documents NetHood PrintHood Recent SendTo Start Menu Templates UserData 0 bytes 6~720~483~328 bytes free

0 File(s) 15 Dir(s)

C:\Documents and Settings\chris>_

And there you go!

1.2 Mac OS X
If you’re using OS X, you’re in luck! You can use the best (in my opinion) text editor, Ruby is already installed for you in OS X 10.2 (Jaguar) and

www.it-ebooks.info
M AC OS X 5

up, and you get to use a real command line (not that silly wanna-be command line we have to use on Windows)! My absolute favorite editor is TextMate (http://macromates.com/). It’s cute, it’s sweet, and it has great Ruby support. The only drawback is that it’s not free. But if you code as much as I do, it’s worth the (fairly cheap) price. And if you’re using a Mac, then I assume you are accustomed to getting the best...and paying for it! : ) In any case, it has a fully functional free trial, so you can give it a try if you want. If you really need a free text editor, though, try TextWrangler (http://www. barebones.com/products/textwrangler/). It gets the job done. Next, you should make a folder on your desktop in which to keep your programs. Right-click (oops! I mean Ctrl-click) on your desktop, and select New Folder. You want to give it a name both descriptive and alluring, such as programs. Nice. Now, let’s get to know your computer a little better. The best way to really have a one-on-one with your computer is on the command line. You get there through the Terminal application (found in the Finder by navigating to Applications/Utilities). Open it, and you’ll see something like this:
Last login: Sat Oct Welcome to Darwin! mezzaluna:~ chris$ _ 8 12:05:33 on ttyp1

If you decide to go with the built-in TextEdit editor (which I do not advise), make sure you save your programs as plain text! (Select Make Plain Text from the Format menu.) Otherwise, your programs will not work.

(That cursor at the end might be blinking, and it might be a vertical line instead of an underscore. Whatever it looks like, it’s your computer’s way of asking “What would you like?”) It’s telling me when I last logged in (though if it’s your first time, it might not say that), welcoming me to Darwin (the deep, dark internals of OS X), and giving me a command prompt and cursor. Prompts, like WestCoast hairdos, come in a variety of shapes, sizes, colors, and levels of expressivity. This isn’t the prompt I normally use (nor is this the hairdo I normally use—I think this is the first time I’ve worn pigtails out of the house), but it’s the default prompt. It’s showing the name of this computer (“mezzaluna”), what two dots look like (“:”), something else I’ll tell you about in just a bit (“~”), who I am (“chris”), and then just a dollar sign (“$”). This is for good luck, I guess. Maybe it’s trying to give my name a little bling bling. I don’t know.

www.it-ebooks.info
M AC OS X 6

Anyway, here we are, at the command line, which is the heart and soul of your computer. You want to be somewhat careful what you do down here, since it’s not too hard to do Bad Things here. (It’s easier to delete everything on your computer than it is to get rid of that dollar sign, for example.) But if you don’t try anything too rambunctious, you should be fine. Here you are, basically just staring at your computer naked. It would only be polite to say “hello” at this point, so type echo hello on the command line, and press Return . Your computer should reply with a friendly hello as well, making your screen look something like this: mezzaluna:~ chris$ echo hello hello mezzaluna:~ chris$ _

And your cursor is blinking again in a “What’s next?” sort of way. Now that you’re acquainted, ask your computer whether it has Ruby installed and, if so, which version. Do this with ruby -v: mezzaluna:~ chris$ ruby -v ruby 1.8.6 (2008-03-03 patchlevel 114) [universal-darwin9.0]

That’s good—I have Ruby 1.8.6 installed. At this very moment, 1.9.1 is the latest. But 1.8.anything is pretty good. If you have an earlier version, you can still use it, but a few examples in this book might not do exactly the same thing for you. (Almost everything should work, though.) Now that Ruby is ready to rumble, it’s time to learn how to get around your computer from the command line and what that ~ in the prompt is all about. The ~ is just a short way of saying “your home directory,” which is just a geek way of saying “your default folder,” which is still kind of geeky anyway. And I’m OK with that. That’s where you are: your home directory. If you want to change to a different directory, you use cd. (No one wants to type change-directory, not even once. I mean, I had to just then, to make a point, but in general you really don’t want to type it.)

www.it-ebooks.info
L INUX 7

mezzaluna:~ chris$ cd Desktop mezzaluna:~/Desktop chris$ _

So, my prompt changed, telling me that I’m now on my desktop, which is itself in my home directory. (Notice that Desktop was capitalized. If you don’t capitalize it, your computer will get angry and begin to swear at you in computerese, with such insults as “No such” and “file” and the worst one of all: “bash.”) You can go back up a directory with cd .., which in this case would put you back in your home directory. And at any time, if you just type cd by itself, that takes you to your home directory, no matter where you are. This is just like the Return spell in Dragon Warrior (the original Dragon Warrior; I don’t play any of these new-fangled “fun” versions...). But we don’t want either of those. We want to go to your programs folder (or directory, or whatever). Assuming you’re still in your Desktop folder (if not, get there quick!), just do this: mezzaluna:~/Desktop chris$ cd programs mezzaluna:~/Desktop/programs chris$ _

But you probably could have guessed that. As they say here in Norway: “Bra!” (See why I like it here? I’m not even allowed to tell you what they say for “five” and “six.”) Now you’re ready to program.

1.3 Linux
If you’re using Linux, you probably already have a favorite text editor, you know how to install Ruby with your package manager, and you better already know where to find your command line. : ) If you don’t have a text editor you’re fond of, though, might I recommend SciTE? It’s made specifically for programming, it plays well with Ruby, and it’s free. You can download it from http://www.scintilla.org/ SciTE.html. If you use another relatively popular editor (emacs, vim, and so on), you can probably find Ruby syntax highlighting rules and such for it. Next, you’ll want to see whether you have Ruby installed already. Type which ruby on your command line. If you see a scary-looking message that looks something like /usr/bin/which: no ruby in (...) , then you’ll need

www.it-ebooks.info
L INUX 8

to install it. Otherwise, see what version of Ruby you are running with ruby -v. If it is older than 1.8.6 (which is what I’m using), then you might want to upgrade. If you’re using Ubuntu, you can use the Synaptic Package Manager to install or upgrade to the latest stable version of Ruby. You’ll find it in the Main menu in the System/Administration group. (On other Linux distributions you’ll want to use whatever is your default package manager, of course, but the general idea is the same.) In Synaptic Package Manager, search for ruby. A bunch of Ruby-related packages will show up; find and install the package named simply ruby. That’s it. Run one final ruby -v, just to make sure the gods are still smiling on you:
$ ruby -v ruby 1.8.6 (2007-09-24 patchlevel 111) [i486-linux]

Perfect! Now all that’s left is to create a directory somewhere to keep your programs in, cd into that directory, and you’re all set! All right! Are you ready? Take a deep breath. Let’s program!

www.it-ebooks.info

Chapter 2

Numbers
Now that you’ve gotten everything ready, it’s time to write your first program! Open your text editor, and type the following: puts 1+2

Save your program (yep, that’s a complete program!) as calc.rb. Now run your program by typing ruby calc.rb into your command line. It should put a 3 on your screen. See, programming isn’t so hard, now is it?

2.1 Did It Work?
If it worked, that’s great. But I get a lot of emails from people who are stuck right here. Did you see a window flash up and then disappear? Or nothing at all? If so, the problem is probably that you didn’t run your program from the command line. Don’t just click your program’s icon. Don’t just press F5 in your text editor. Run it by typing ruby calc.rb into your command line. Trust me.

www.it-ebooks.info
I NTRODUCTION TO PUTS 10

2.2 Introduction to puts
So, what’s going on in that program? I’m sure you can guess what the
1+2 does; our program is basically the same as this: puts 3

puts simply writes onto the screen whatever comes after it.

2.3 Integer and Float
In most programming languages (and Ruby is no exception), numbers without decimal points are called integers, and numbers with decimal points are usually called floating-point numbers or, more simply, floats. Here are some integers:
5 -205 9999999999999999999999999 0

And here are some floats:
54.321 0.001 -205.3884 0.0

In practice, most programs don’t use floats; they use only integers. (After all, no one wants to look at 7.4 emails, browse 1.8 web pages, or listen to 5.24 of their favorite songs.) Floats are used more for academic purposes (physics experiments and such) and for audio and video (including 3D) programs. Even most money programs use integers; they just keep track of the number of pennies!

2.4 Simple Arithmetic
So far, we have all the makings of a simple calculator. (Calculators always use floats, so if you want your computer to act just like a cal-

www.it-ebooks.info
S IMPLE A RITHMETIC 11

culator, you should also use floats.) You type numbers using the digit keys (either at the top of your keyboard or on the numeric keypad). For decimal points, you use the period (or full-stop, normally close to the M key on the bottom row or over on the numeric keypad). Don’t, however, type commas into your numbers. If you enter 1,000,000, you’ll just confuse Ruby. For addition and subtraction, we use + and - , as we saw. For multiplication, we use * , and for division we use / . Most keyboards have these keys in the numeric keypad on the far-right side, but you can also use Shift 8 and / (the same key as the ? key). Let’s try to expand our calc.rb program a little. Try coding this program: puts 1.0 + 2.0 puts 2.0 * 3.0 puts 5.0 - 8.0 puts 9.0 / 2.0

This is what the program returns:
3.0 6.0 -3.0 4.5

(The spaces in the program are not important; they just make the code easier to read.) Well, that wasn’t too surprising. Now let’s try it with integers: puts 1+2 puts 2*3 puts 5-8 puts 9/2

www.it-ebooks.info
A F EW T HINGS TO T RY 12

This is mostly the same, right?
3 6 -3 4

Uh...except for that last one! When you do arithmetic with integers, you’ll get integer answers. When your computer can’t get the “right” answer, it always rounds down. (Of course, 4 is the right answer in integer arithmetic for 9/2. It just might not be the answer you were expecting.) Perhaps you’re wondering what integer division is good for. Well, let’s say you’re going to the movies but you have only $9. When I lived in Portland a few years back, you could see a movie at the Bagdad for two bucks. (It was cheaper for two people to go to the Bagdad and get a pitcher of beer, good beer, than to go see a movie at your typical theater. And the seats all had tables in front of them! For your beer! It was heavenly!) Anyway, nostalgia aside, how many movies could you see at the Bagdad for nine bucks? 9/2... 4 movies. You can see that 4.5 is definitely not the right answer in this case; they will not let you watch half of a movie or let half of you in to see a whole movie...some things just aren’t divisible. So, now experiment with some programs of your own! If you want to write more complex expressions, you can use parentheses. For example: puts 5 * (12-8) + -15 puts 98 + (59872 / (13*8)) * -51

5 -29227

2.5 A Few Things to Try
Write a program that tells you the following: • Hours in a year. How many hours are in a year? • Minutes in a decade. How many minutes are in a decade?

www.it-ebooks.info
A F EW T HINGS TO T RY 13

• Your age in seconds. How many seconds old are you? (I’m not going to check your answer, so be as accurate—or not—as you want.) Here’s a tougher question: • Our dear author’s age. If I am 1,025 million seconds old (which I am, though I was in the 800 millions when I started this book), how old am I?

www.it-ebooks.info

Chapter 3

Letters
We’ve learned all about numbers, but what about letters? Words? Text? We refer to groups of letters in a program as strings. (You can think of beads with letters on them being strung together.) To make it easier to see just what part of the code is in a string, I’ll color strings 'blue'. Here are some strings:
'Hello.' 'Ruby rocks.' 'Nobody deserves a mime, Buffy.' 'Snoopy says #%^?&*@! when he stubs his toe.' ' ' ''

As you can see, strings can have punctuation, digits, symbols, and spaces in them...more than just letters. That last string doesn’t have anything in it at all; we call that an empty string. We used puts to print numbers; let’s try it with some strings: puts 'Hello, world!' puts '' puts 'Good-bye.'

Hello, world! Good-bye.

Dig it.

www.it-ebooks.info
S TRING A RITHMETIC 15

3.1 String Arithmetic
Just as you can do arithmetic on numbers, you can also do arithmetic on strings! Well, sort of...you can add strings, anyway. Let’s try to add two strings and see what puts does with that: puts 'I like' + 'apple pie.'

I likeapple pie.

Snap! I forgot to put a space between 'I like' and 'apple pie.'. Spaces don’t usually matter much in your code, but they matter inside strings. (You know what they say: computers don’t do what you want them to do, only what you tell them to do.) Take two: puts 'I like ' + 'apple pie.' puts 'I like' + ' apple pie.'

I like apple pie. I like apple pie.

(As you can see, it didn’t matter to which string I added the space.) So, you can add strings, but you can also multiply them! (And I know you wanted to...you were all like, “But, Chris, can we multiply them?” Yes. Yes, you can.) Watch this: puts 'blink ' * 4

And you get this: batting her eyes

(Just kidding...not even Ruby is that clever.) blink blink blink blink

If you think about it, this makes perfect sense. After all, 7*3 really just means 7+7+7, so 'moo'*3 just means 'moo'+'moo'+'moo'.

www.it-ebooks.info
12 VS . ’12’ 16

3.2 12 vs. ’12’
Before we get any further, we should make sure we understand the difference between numbers and digits. 12 is a number, but '12' is a string of two digits. Let’s play around with this for a while: puts 12 + + 12 12'

puts '12' + '12' puts '12

24 1212 12 + 12

How about this? puts 2 * 5 5 5'

puts '2' * puts '2 *

10 22222 2 * 5

These examples are pretty clear. However, if you’re not too careful with how you mix your strings and your numbers, you might run into...

3.3 Problems
At this point you may have tried some things that didn’t work. If not, here are a few: puts '12' + 12 puts '2' * '5'

#<TypeError: can't convert Fixnum into String>

www.it-ebooks.info
P ROBLEMS 17

Hmmm...an error message. The problem is that you can’t really add a number to a string or multiply a string by another string. It doesn’t make any more sense than this does: puts 'Betty' + 12 puts 'Fred' * 'John'

Here’s something else to be aware of: you can write 'pig'*5 in a program, since it just means five sets of the string 'pig' all added together. However, you can’t write 5*'pig', since that means 'pig' sets of the number 5, which is...poetic, at best. Finally, what if we want a program to print out You’re swell! ? We can try this: puts 'You're swell!'

Well, that won’t work; I can tell that just from the syntax coloring. I won’t even try to run it. The problem is that your computer can’t tell the difference between an apostrophe and a single quote (to end the string). I think the confusion is reasonable here, though. They are the same character, after all. We need a way to tell the computer “I want an apostrophe here, inside this string.” How do we let the computer know we want to stay in the string? We have to escape the apostrophe, like this: puts 'You\'re swell!'

You're swell!

Why is this called escaping? I have no idea—maybe because we are escaping from the normal way of doing things? Yeah, that’s a bit of a stretch. But whatever the reason, that’s what programmers call it, so that’s what we’ll call it.

The backslash is the escape character. In other words, if you have a backslash and another character, they are sometimes translated into a new character. The only things the backslash escapes, though, are the apostrophe and the backslash itself. (If you think about it, escape characters must always escape themselves, too, in order to allow for the construction of any string. Why is that?)

www.it-ebooks.info
P ROBLEMS 18

Let’s see a few examples of escaping in strings: puts 'You\'re swell!' puts 'backslash at the end of a string: puts 'up\\down' puts 'up\down' \\'

You're swell! backslash at the end of a string: up\down up\down \

Since the backslash does not escape a d but does escape itself, those last two strings are identical. Obviously they don’t look the same in the code, but when your program is actually running, those are just two ways of describing identical strings. You good so far? clever.... Good. Let’s start doing something slightly more

www.it-ebooks.info

Chapter 4

Variables and Assignment
So far, whenever we have putsed a string or a number, the thing we putsed is gone. What I mean is, if we wanted to print something out twice, we would have to type it in twice: puts '...you can say that again...' puts '...you can say that again...'
Sure, sure, we could copy and paste that line, but that is not maximally lazy: what if we want to change one of those lines at some point in the future? We don’t want to have to change anything twice. Copy and paste is the opposite of “Don’t Repeat Yourself.”

...you can say that again... ...you can say that again...

It would be nice if we could just type it in once and then hang on to it...store it somewhere. Well, we can, of course. It would have been insensitive to bring it up otherwise. To store the string in your computer’s memory for use later in your program, you need to give the string a name. Programmers often refer to this process as assignment, and they call the names variables. A variable name can usually be just about any sequence of letters and numbers, but in Ruby the first character of this name needs to be a lowercase letter. Let’s try that last program again, but this time I will give the string the name my_string (though I could just as well have named it str or myOwnLittleString or henry_the_8th): my_string = '...you can say that again...' puts my_string puts my_string

So, is this program prettier than the first example? Yes. This is longer but prettier. We’ll make it prettier still, and even shorter than the original, on page 63. Beautiful....

www.it-ebooks.info
C HAPTER 4. VARIABLES AND A SSIGNMENT 20

...you can say that again... ...you can say that again...

Whenever you tried to do something to my_string, the program did it to '...you can say that again...' instead. You can think of the variable my_string as “pointing to” the string '...you can say that again...'. Here’s a slightly more motivated example: name = 'Anya Christina Emmanuella Jenkins Harris' puts 'My name is ' + name + '.' puts 'Wow! ' + name puts 'is a really long name!'

My name is Anya Christina Emmanuella Jenkins Harris. Wow! Anya Christina Emmanuella Jenkins Harris
My wife made me put in the Harris.

is a really long name!

Also, just as we can assign an object to a variable, we can reassign a different object to that variable. (This is why we call them variables— what they point to can vary.) composer = 'Mozart' puts composer + ' was "da bomb" in his day.' composer = 'Beethoven' puts 'But I prefer ' + composer + ', personally.'

Mozart was "da bomb" in his day. But I prefer Beethoven, personally.

Of course, variables can point to any kind of object, not just strings: my_own_var = 'just another ' + 'string' puts my_own_var my_own_var = 5 * (1+2) puts my_own_var

www.it-ebooks.info
C HAPTER 4. VARIABLES AND A SSIGNMENT 21

just another string 15

In fact, variables can point to just about anything...except other variables. So, what happens if we try the following? var1 = 8 var2 = var1 puts var1 puts var2 puts '' var1 = 'eight' puts var1 puts var2

8 8 eight 8

On the second line, when we tried to point var2 to var1, it really pointed to 8 instead (just like var1 was pointing to). Then on the eighth line, we had var1 point to the string 'eight', but since var2 was never really pointing at var1, it stays pointing at the number 8. If you like to think about these things visually, it might help to look at Figure 4.1, on the next page.

www.it-ebooks.info
C HAPTER 4. VARIABLES AND A SSIGNMENT 22

Figure 4.1: Variables point to values.

www.it-ebooks.info

Chapter 5

Mixing It Up
We’ve looked at a few kinds of objects (integers, floats, and strings), and we made variables point to them. Now it’s time for them all to play nicely together. We’ve seen that if we want a program to print 25 , the following does not work, because you can’t add numbers and strings together: var1 = 2

var2 = '5' puts var1 + var2

Part of the problem is that your computer doesn’t know if you were trying to get 7 (2 + 5) or if you wanted to get 25 ('2' + '5'). But we’ll learn how to do both. Before we can add these together, we need some way of getting the string version of var1 or of getting the integer version of var2.

5.1 Conversions
To get the string version of an object, we simply write .to_s after it: var1 = 2

var2 = '5' puts var1.to_s + var2

25

www.it-ebooks.info
C ONVERSIONS 24

Similarly, .to_i gives the integer version of an object, and .to_f gives the float version. Let’s look at what these three methods do (and don’t do) a little more closely: var1 = 2

var2 = '5' puts var1.to_s + var2 puts var1 + var2.to_i

25 7

Notice that, even after we got the string version of var1 by calling to_s, Unless we explicitly reassign var1 (which requires an = sign), it will point at 2 for the life of the program. var1 was always pointing at 2 and never at '2'.

Now let’s try some more interesting (and a few just weird) conversions: puts '15'.to_f puts '99.999' .to_f puts '99.999' .to_i puts '' puts '5 is my favorite number!' .to_i puts 'Who asked you about 5 or whatever?' .to_i puts 'Your momma did.'.to_f puts '' puts 'stringy' .to_s puts 3.to_i

15.0 99.999 99 5 0 0.0 stringy 3

www.it-ebooks.info
A NOTHER L OOK AT PUTS 25

So, this probably gave you some surprises. The first one is pretty standard, giving 15.0 . After that, we converted the string '99.999' to a float and to an integer. The float did what we expected; the integer was, as always, rounded down. Next, we had some examples of some...unusual strings being converted into numbers. On line 5, to_i ignores the first thing it doesn’t understand (and the rest of the string from that point on). So, the first one was converted to 5, but the others, since they started with letters, were ignored completely, so the computer just picks zero. Finally, we saw that our last two conversions did nothing at all, just as we would expect.

5.2 Another Look at puts
There’s something strange about our favorite method. Take a look at this: puts puts 20 20.to_s

puts '20'

20 20 20

Why do these three all print the same thing? Well, the last two should, since 20.to_s is '20'. But what about the first one, the integer 20? For that matter, what does it even mean to write the integer 20? When you write a 2 and then a 0 on a piece of paper, you are writing a string, not an integer. The integer 20 is the number of fingers and toes I have; it isn’t a 2 followed by a 0. Well, here’s the big secret behind our friend puts: before puts tries to write out an object, it uses to_s to get the string version of that object. In fact, the s in puts stands for string; puts really means put string. This may not seem too exciting now, but Ruby has many, many kinds of objects (you’ll even learn how to make your own), and it’s nice to know what will happen if you try to puts a really weird object, such as a picture of your grandmother or a music file or something. It’ll always

www.it-ebooks.info
T HE GETS M ETHOD 26

be converted to a string first. But that will come later. In the meantime, we have a few more methods for you, and they allow us to write all sorts of fun programs.

5.3 The gets Method
If puts means put string, I’m sure you can guess what gets stands for. And just as puts always spits out strings, gets retrieves only strings. And whence does it get them? From you! Well, from your keyboard, anyway. And since your keyboard makes only strings, that works out beautifully. What actually happens is that gets just sits there, reading what you type until you press Enter . Let’s try it: puts gets

Is there an echo in here? Is there an echo in here?

Of course, whatever you type will just get repeated back to you. Run it a few times, and try typing different things.

5.4 Did It Work?
Maybe you didn’t need any help installing Ruby, so you skipped Chapter 1. No problem. Maybe you’ve done a little programming before, so you skipped Chapter 2. That’s fine. The only thing is that you missed some stuff there that you didn’t really need until now. If you haven’t been running your programs from the command line, then you’ll almost certainly have problems with gets, and we’re going to be using it a lot from now on. So, if you saved your program as example.rb, you should really run your program by typing ruby example.rb into your command line. If you’re having trouble getting around on your command line, check out Chapter 1, Getting Started, on page 1.

www.it-ebooks.info
T HE CHOMP M ETHOD 27

5.5 The chomp Method
Excitement! Now we can make interactive programs! In this one, type your name, and it will greet you: puts 'Hello there, and what\'s your name?' name = gets puts 'Your name is ' + name + '? What a lovely name!' :)' puts 'Pleased to meet you, ' + name + '.

Eek! I just ran it—I typed my name, and this is what happened:
Hello there, and what's your name? Chris Your name is Chris ? . What a lovely name! :) Pleased to meet you, Chris

Hmmm...it looks like when I typed the letters C , h , r , i , and s and then pressed Enter , gets got all the letters in my name and the Enter ! Fortunately, there’s a method that deals with just this sort of thing: chomp. It takes off any Enter characters hanging out at the end of your string. Let’s try that program again, but with chomp to help us this time: puts 'Hello there, and what\'s your name?' name = gets.chomp puts 'Your name is ' + name + '? What a lovely name!' :)' puts 'Pleased to meet you, ' + name + '.

Hello there, and what's your name? Chris Your name is Chris? What a lovely name! :) Pleased to meet you, Chris.

Much better! Notice that since name is pointing to gets.chomp, we don’t ever have to say name.chomp; name was already chomped. (Of course, if we did chomp it again, it wouldn’t do anything; it has no more Enter characters to chomp off. We could chomp on that string all day, and it wouldn’t change it. Like week-old bubble gum.)

www.it-ebooks.info
A F EW T HINGS TO T RY 28

5.6 A Few Things to Try
• Full name greeting. Write a program that asks for a person’s first name, then middle, and then last. Finally, it should greet the person using their full name. • Bigger, better favorite number. Write a program that asks for a person’s favorite number. Have your program add 1 to the number, and then suggest the result as a bigger and better favorite number. (Do be tactful about it, though.)

5.7 Mind Your Variables
When writing a program, I always try to have a good feel for what each variable is pointing to: a number, a string, or whatever. Like in the favorite number program, at some point you’ll have the person’s favorite number as a string, and at another point you’ll have it as an integer. It’s important to keep track of which is which, and you can do this by keeping them in different variables. And name the variables so that it’s easy to tell what they are at a glance. If I had a variable for someone’s name, I might call it name, and I would just assume it was a string. If I had someone’s age in a variable, I might call it age, and I’d assume it was an integer. So if I needed to have the string version of someone’s age, I’d try to make that obvious by calling it something like age_string or age_as_string. I’m not sure you know, but this book started out as an online tutorial. (It was much shorter back then.) I’ve gotten hundreds of emails from people getting stuck. In most of those cases, the problem was a conversion problem. And usually, it was just someone trying to add an integer and a string together. Let’s look at that error a bit more closely: my_birth_month = 'August' my_birth_day = 3

puts my_birth_month + my_birth_day

#<TypeError: can't convert Fixnum into String>

What is this error telling us? First, what’s a Fixnum? Basically, it’s an integer. For performance reasons, given the way computers are built

www.it-ebooks.info
M IND Y OUR VARIABLES 29

and such, there are two different classes of integers in Ruby: Fixnums and Bignums. Basically, really big integers are Bignums, and smaller ones are Fixnums. You don’t really need to know this, though; all you need to know is that when you see Fixnum or Bignum, you know it’s an integer. So, it can’t convert an integer into a string. Well, you know it can convert an integer into a string, but it doesn’t want to without your explicit instructions. (Eh...it’s only a computer, after all, and computers aren’t exactly known for their independent thinking and initiative.) Honestly, it’s probably a good thing, because maybe you don’t want to convert the integer into a string, you know? Maybe you want to convert the string into an integer. It’s the whole “2 plus 5 adding up to 7 or 25” problem we covered on page 23. It’s easy to get frustrated when your program has errors. I try not to think of them as errors, though. I try to think of them as the pathetic attempts of a socially inept non-native English speaker (your computer) asking for help. If only your computer were a bit more cultured, it might say something more like, “Excuse me, but I’m unclear as to just one small point...did you want me to convert the integer to a string here, or vice versa? Although it’s probably obvious to any human what you are trying to do, I’m just not that bright.” Then it would laugh nervously. Someday our computers will do just that, but in the meantime, pity the poor fool.

Most programming languages don’t have anything like Bignum (at least not built in), so all of your integers have to be relatively small, and if you add two largish integers, you might end up with a very small one or even a negative one. Blech.

www.it-ebooks.info

Chapter 6

More About Methods
So far we’ve seen a number of different methods—puts, gets, and so on. (Pop quiz: List all the methods we have seen so far! There are ten of them; the answer is below.) However, we haven’t really talked about what methods are. I believe the technical definition is that “methods are things that do stuff.” If objects (such as strings, integers, and floats) are the nouns in the Ruby language, then methods are like the verbs. And, just like in English, you can’t have a verb without a noun to do the verb. For example, ticking isn’t something that just happens; a clock (biological or otherwise) has to do it. In English, we would say “The clock ticks.” In Ruby we would say clock.tick (assuming that clock was a Ruby object, of course, and one that could tick). Programmers might say we were “calling clock’s tick method” or that we “called tick on clock.” (This goes a long way toward explaining why we aren’t invited to many parties. We? They! Why they aren’t invited to many parties....) Anyway, did you take the quiz? Good. Well, I’m sure you remembered the methods puts, gets, and chomp, since we just covered those. You probably also got our conversion methods, to_i, to_f, and to_s. But did you get the other four? Yeah? No? Why, it’s none other than our old arithmetic buddies: +, -, *, and /! (See, it’s stuff like that, too. Arithmetic buddies? It would have sounded way cooler if I had said it in Klingon.) As I was saying, just as every verb needs a noun, every method needs an object. It’s usually easy to tell which object is performing the method. It’s what comes right before the dot, like in our clock.tick example or in 101.to_s. Sometimes, though, it’s not quite as obvious, as with the arithmetic methods. As it turns out, 5 + 5 is really just a shortcut way of writing 5.+ 5.

www.it-ebooks.info
C HAPTER 6. M ORE A BOUT M ETHODS 31

For example: puts('hello '.+ 'world') puts((10.* 9).+ 9)

hello world 99

It isn’t very pretty, so we won’t ever write it like that; however, it’s important to understand what is really happening. On my machine, that also gives me a warning: warning: parenthesize argument(s) for future version

It still ran the code just fine, but it’s telling me it’s having trouble figuring out what I mean and to use more parentheses in the future. This also gives us a deeper understanding of why we can do 'pig'*5 but we can’t do 5*'pig': 'pig'*5 is telling 'pig' to do the multiplying, but 5*'pig' is telling 5 to do the multiplying. 'pig' knows how to make 5 copies of itself and add them all together; however, 5 will have a much more difficult time of making 'pig' copies of itself and adding them together. And, of course, we still have puts and gets to explain. Where are their objects? In English, you can sometimes leave out the noun; for example, if a villain yells “Die!” the implicit noun is whomever he is yelling at. In Ruby, if I say puts 'to be or not to be', the implicit object is whatever object you happen to be in. But we don’t even know how to be in an object yet; we’ve always been inside a special object Ruby has created for us that represents the whole program. You can always see what object you are in by using the special variable self. Watch this: puts self

main

If you didn’t entirely follow all of that, that’s OK. The important thing to get from all this is that every method is being done by some object, even if it doesn’t have a dot in front of it. If you understand that, then you’re all set.

www.it-ebooks.info
F ANCY S TRING M ETHODS 32

6.1 Fancy String Methods
Let’s learn a few fun string methods. You don’t have to memorize them all; you can just look up this page again if you forget them. I just want to show you a small part of what strings can do. In fact, I can’t remember even half of the string methods myself—but that’s fine, because you can find great references on the Internet with all the string methods listed and explained. (I will show you where to find them in Chapter 15, Beyond This Fine Book, on page 145.) Really, I don’t even want to know all the string methods; it’s kind of like knowing every word in the dictionary. I can speak English just fine without knowing every word in the dictionary. (And isn’t that really the whole point of the dictionary? You don’t have to know what’s in it.) Our first string method is reverse, which returns a reversed version of the string: var1 = 'stop' var2 = 'deliver repaid desserts' var3 = '....TCELES B HSUP puts var1.reverse puts var2.reverse puts var3.reverse puts var1 puts var2 puts var3 A magic spell?'

FF1 SPOILER ALERT! (From back when final used to mean something.)

pots stressed diaper reviled ?lleps cigam A stop deliver repaid desserts ....TCELES B HSUP A magic spell? PUSH B SELECT....

As you can see, reverse doesn’t change the original string; it just makes a new backward version of it. That’s why var1 is still 'stop' even after we called reverse on it.

www.it-ebooks.info
F ANCY S TRING M ETHODS 33

Another string method is length, which tells us the number of characters (including spaces) in the string: puts 'What is your full name?' name = gets.chomp puts 'Did you know there are ' + name.length + ' characters' puts 'in your name, ' + name + '?'

What is your full name? Christopher David Pine #<TypeError: can't convert Fixnum into String>

Uh-oh! See? There it is! It’s an easy mistake to make. Anyway, if you didn’t know to be on the lookout for this error, you can still figure that the problem must have happened sometime after the line name = gets.chomp, since I was able to type my name. See whether you can figure it out. The problem is with length: it gives us an integer, but we want a string. That’s easy enough; we’ll just throw in a .to_s (and cross our fingers): puts 'What is your full name?' name = gets.chomp puts 'Did you know there are ' + name.length.to_s + ' characters' puts 'in your name, ' + name + '?'

You probably think that I made that mistake on purpose, since I’m obviously such a fabulous programmer that I’m writing a book on it. You were thinking that, right? Well...never mind.

What is your full name? Christopher David Pine Did you know there are 22 characters in your name, Christopher David Pine?

No, I did not know that. Note: 22 is the number of characters in my name, not the number of letters (count ’em). I guess we could write a program that asks for your first, middle, and last names individually and then adds those lengths together—hey, why don’t you do that? Go ahead, I’ll wait. Did you do it? Right on. Well, unless your name is Bjørn or Håvard, in which case you had some problems. Ruby is expecting only ASCII characters (basically the

www.it-ebooks.info
F ANCY S TRING M ETHODS 34

stuff you can type on an American keyboard—the A in ASCII stands for American). It is possible to use any character in any language, but it requires some extra work and is just more advanced than what we’re going to cover. So, a number of string methods can also change the case (uppercase and lowercase) of your string. upcase changes every lowercase letter to uppercase, and downcase changes every uppercase letter to lowercase. swapcase switches the case of every letter in the string, and finally, capitalize is just like downcase, except it switches the first character to uppercase (if it’s a letter). letters = 'aAbBcCdDeE' puts letters.upcase puts letters.downcase puts letters.swapcase puts letters.capitalize puts ' a'.capitalize puts letters

AABBCCDDEE aabbccddee AaBbCcDdEe Aabbccddee a aAbBcCdDeE

As you can see from the line puts ' a'.capitalize, the capitalize method capitalizes only the first character, not the first letter. Also, as we have seen before, throughout all of these method calls, letters remains unchanged. I don’t mean to belabor the point, but it’s important to understand. Some methods do change the associated object, but we haven’t seen any yet, and we won’t for some time. The last of the fancy string methods we’ll look at do visual formatting. The first, center, adds spaces to the beginning and end of the string to make it centered. However, just like you have to tell the puts method what you want it to print and you have to tell the + method what you want it to add, you have to tell the center method how wide you want your centered string to be.

www.it-ebooks.info
F ANCY S TRING M ETHODS 35

So if I wanted to center the lines of a poem, I would do it like this: line_width = 50 puts( puts( puts( puts( puts( 'Old Mother Hubbard'.center(line_width)) 'Sat in her cupboard' .center(line_width)) 'Eating her curds and whey,'.center(line_width)) 'When along came a spider'.center(line_width)) 'Who sat down beside her'.center(line_width))

puts('And scared her poor shoe dog away.'.center(line_width))

I wanted to line up the .center line_width part, so I added those extra spaces before the strings. This is just because I think it is prettier that way. Programmers often have strong feelings about code aesthetics, and they often disagree about them. The more you program, the more you will come into your own style.

Old Mother Hubbard Sat in her cupboard Eating her curds and whey, When along came a spider Who sat down beside her And scared her poor shoe dog away.

Hmmm...I don’t think that’s how that nursery rhyme goes, but I’m too lazy to look it up. Speaking of laziness, see how I stored the width of the poem in the variable line_width? This was so that if I want to go back later and make the poem wider, I have to change only the first line of the program, instead of every line that does centering. With a very long poem, this could save me a lot of time. That’s the kind of laziness we want in our programs. About that centering...you may have noticed that it isn’t quite as beautiful as a word processor would have done. If you really want perfect centering (and maybe a nicer font), then you should just use a word processor. Ruby is a wonderful tool, but no tool is the right tool for every job. The other two string-formatting methods we’ll look at today are ljust and rjust, which stand for left justify and right justify. They are similar to center, except that they pad the string with spaces on the left and right sides, respectively. Let’s take a look at all three in action: line_width = 40 str = '--> text <--' puts(str.ljust( line_width)) puts(str.center(line_width)) puts(str.rjust( line_width)) puts(str.ljust(line_width/2) + str.rjust(line_width/2))

www.it-ebooks.info
A F EW T HINGS TO T RY 36

--> text <---> text <---> text <---> text <---> text <--

6.2 A Few Things to Try
• Angry boss. Write an angry boss program that rudely asks what you want. Whatever you answer, the angry boss should yell it back to you and then fire you. For example, if you type in I want a raise, it should yell back like this:
WHADDAYA MEAN "I WANT A RAISE"?!? YOU'RE FIRED!!

• Table of contents. Here’s something for you to do in order to play around more with center, ljust, and rjust: write a program that will display a table of contents so that it looks like this:
Table of Contents Chapter 1: Chapter 2: Chapter 3: Getting Started Numbers Letters page page 1 9

page 13

6.3 Higher Math
(This section is optional. Some of it assumes a fair degree of mathematical knowledge. If you aren’t interested, you can go straight to Chapter 7, Flow Control, on page 41, without any problems. However, a quick scan of this section might come in handy.) There aren’t nearly as many number methods as there are string methods (though I still don’t know them all off the top of my head). Here we’ll look at the rest of the arithmetic methods, a random number generator, and the Math object, with its trigonometric and transcendental methods.

www.it-ebooks.info
M ORE A RITHMETIC 37

6.4 More Arithmetic
The other two arithmetic methods are ** (exponentiation) and % (modulus). So if you want to say “five squared” in Ruby, you would write it as 5**2. You can also use floats for your exponent, so if you want the square root of 5, you could write 5**0.5. The modulus method gives you the remainder after division by a number. So, for example, if you divide 7 by 3, you get 2 with a remainder of 1. Let’s see it working in a program: puts 5**2 puts 5**0.5 puts 7/3 puts 7%3 puts 365%7

Modulus, much like integer division, might seem bizarre, but it is actually really useful, often when used with integer division.

25 2.23606797749979 2 1 1

From that last line, we learn that a (nonleap) year has some number of weeks, plus one day. So if your birthday was on a Tuesday this year, it will be on a Wednesday next year. You can also use floats with the modulus method. Basically, it works the only sensible way it could...but I’ll let you play around with that. I have one last method to mention before we check out the random number generator: abs. This method simply returns the absolute value of the number: puts (5-2).abs puts (2-5).abs

3 3

www.it-ebooks.info
R ANDOM N UMBERS 38

6.5 Random Numbers
Ruby comes with a pretty nice random number generator. The method to get a randomly chosen number is rand. If you call rand just like that, you’ll get a float greater than or equal to 0.0 and less than 1.0. If you give it an integer parameter (by calling rand(5), for example), it will give you an integer greater than or equal to 0 and less than 5 (so five possible numbers, from 0 to 4). Let’s see rand in action: puts rand puts rand puts rand puts(rand(100)) puts(rand(100)) puts(rand(100)) puts(rand(1)) puts(rand(1)) puts(rand(1)) puts(rand(9999999999999999999999999999999999999)) puts('The weatherman said there is a') puts(rand(101).to_s + '% chance of rain,') puts('but you can never trust a weatherman.' )
Why all the parentheses? Well, when I have several levels of things going on, all on a single line of code, I like to add parentheses to make sure the computer and I agree on just what is supposed to happen.

0.623180804567097 0.7584826837572 0.507198805874463 4 24 25 0 0 0 5000684865397272822734700824226029800 The weatherman said there is a 39% chance of rain, but you can never trust a weatherman.

Note that for the weatherman example I used rand(101) to get numbers from 0 to 100 and that rand(1) always returns 0. Not understanding the range of possible return values is the biggest mistake I see people

www.it-ebooks.info
R ANDOM N UMBERS 39

make with rand, even professional programmers, and even in finished products you can buy at the store. I once had a CD player that if set on Random Play, would play every song but the last one. (I wonder what would have happened if I had put in a CD with only one song on it.) Sometimes you might want rand to return the same random numbers in the same sequence on two different runs of your program. (For example, I used randomly generated numbers to generate the worlds in Civilization III. If I found a world that I really liked, I’d save it, run tests on it, and so on.) In order to do this, you need to set the seed, which you can do with srand: srand 1976 puts(rand(100)) puts(rand(100)) puts(rand(100)) puts(rand(100)) puts '' srand 1976 puts(rand(100)) puts(rand(100)) puts(rand(100)) puts(rand(100))

50 21 80 15 50 21 80 15

It will do the same thing every time you seed it with the same number. If you want to get different numbers again (like what happens if you never use srand), then just call srand, passing in no parameter. This seeds it with a really weird number, using (among other things) the current time on your computer, down to the millisecond.

www.it-ebooks.info
T HE M ATH O BJECT 40

6.6 The Math Object
Finally, let’s look at the Math object. They say a code example is worth 1,000 words: puts(Math::PI) puts(Math::E) puts(Math.cos(Math::PI/3)) puts(Math.tan(Math::PI/4)) puts(Math.log(Math::E**2)) puts((1 + Math.sqrt(5))/2)
Math::PI is actually not a variable; it’s a constant. It doesn’t vary. Remember how I said that variables in Ruby have to start with a lowercase letter? Constants start with an uppercase letter. The main difference is that Ruby complains if you try to reassign a constant.

3.14159265358979 2.71828182845905 0.5 1.0 2.0 1.61803398874989

The first thing you noticed was probably the :: notation. Explaining the scope operator (which is what that is) is beyond the...uh...scope of this book. No pun intended. I swear. Suffice it to say, you can use Math::PI like it were any other variable. As you can see, Math has all the features you would expect a decent scientific calculator to have. And, as always, the floats are really close to being the right answers but not exact; don’t trust them further than you can calculate them.

www.it-ebooks.info

Chapter 7

Flow Control
We’ve covered a lot of the basics, but this is where we really breathe life into our programs. Up to this point, our programs have been so flat and predictable. Each time we run them, we’ll get pretty much the same experience. I mean, if a program asks me for my name, I guess instead of “Chris,” I could say “Stud-chunks McStallion” (as they used to call me), but that’s hardly a new experience. After this chapter, though, we’ll be able to write truly interactive programs. In the past, we made programs that said different things depending on your keyboard input, but after this chapter they will actually do different things. But how will we determine when to do one thing instead of another? We need...

7.1 Comparison Methods
You’re getting good at this, so I’ll try to let the code do the talking. First, to see whether one object is greater than or less than another, we use the methods > and <: puts 1 > 2 puts 1 < 2

false true

No problem.

www.it-ebooks.info
C OMPARISON M ETHODS 42

Likewise, we can find out whether an object is greater than or equal to another (or less than or equal to) with the methods >= and <=: puts 5 >= 5 puts 5 <= 4

true false

And finally, we can see whether two objects are equal using == (which means “Are these equal?”) and != (which means “Are these different?”). It’s important not to confuse = with ==. = is for telling a variable to point at an object (assignment), and == is for asking the question “Are these two objects equal?” puts 1 == 1 puts 2 != 1

But don’t feel too bad if you do confuse = and == in your code; I still do it from time to time. Just try to be aware of it.

true true

Of course, we can compare strings, too. When strings get compared, Ruby compares their lexicographical ordering, which basically means the order they appear in a dictionary. For example, cat comes before dog in the dictionary, so we have this: puts 'cat' < 'dog'

true

This has a catch, though. The way computers usually do things, they order capital letters as coming before lowercase letters. (That’s how they store the letters in fonts—for example, all the capital letters first and then the lowercase ones.) This means it will think 'Xander' comes before 'bug lady'. So if you want to figure out which word would come first in a real dictionary, make sure to use downcase (or upcase or capitalize) on both words before you try to compare them.

www.it-ebooks.info
B RANCHING 43

puts 'bug lady'

< 'Xander'

puts 'bug lady'.downcase < 'Xander'.downcase

false true

Similarly surprising is this: puts 2 < 10

puts '2' < '10'

true false

OK, 2 is less than 10, so no problem. But that last one?! Well, the '1' character comes before the '2' character—remember, in a string those are just characters. The '0' character after the '1' doesn’t make the '1' any larger. One last note before we move on: the comparison methods aren’t giving us the strings 'true' and 'false'; they are giving us the special objects true and false that represent...well, truth and falsity. (Of course, true.to_s gives us the string 'true', which is why puts printed true .) true and false are used all the time in a language construct called branching, and that’s a big enough topic that we need a fresh new page just to hold it.

7.2 Branching
Branching is a simple concept, but it’s powerful. In fact, it’s so simple that I bet I don’t even have to explain it at all; I’ll just show you: puts 'Hello, what\'s your name?' name = gets.chomp puts 'Hello, ' + name + '.' if name == 'Chris' puts 'What a lovely name!' end

www.it-ebooks.info
B RANCHING 44

Hello, what's your name? Chris Hello, Chris. What a lovely name!

But if we put in a different name...
Hello, what's your name? Chewbacca Hello, Chewbacca.

And that is branching. If what comes after the if is true, we run the code between the if and the end. If what comes after the if is false, we don’t. Plain and simple. I indented the code between the if and the end just because I think it’s easier to keep track of the branching that way. Almost all programmers do this, regardless of what language they are programming in. It may not seem that helpful in this simple example, but when programs get more complex, it makes a big difference. Often, when people send me programs that don’t work but they can’t figure out why, it’s something that is both: • obvious to see what the problem is if the indentation is nice, and • impossible to see what the problem is otherwise. So, try to keep your indentation nice and consistent. Have your if and end line up vertically, and have everything between them indented. I use an indentation of two spaces. Often, we would like a program to do one thing if an expression is true and another if it is false. That’s what else is for.

www.it-ebooks.info
B RANCHING 45

puts 'I am a fortune-teller. name = gets.chomp if name == 'Chris'

Tell me your name:'

puts 'I see great things in your future.' else puts 'Your future is...oh my! end Look at the time!' puts 'I really have to go, sorry!'

I am a fortune-teller. Chris

Tell me your name:

I see great things in your future.

Now let’s try a different name:
I am a fortune-teller. Boromir Your future is...oh my! Look at the time! I really have to go, sorry! Tell me your name:

And one more:
I am a fortune-teller. Ringo Your future is...oh my! Look at the time! I really have to go, sorry! Tell me your name:

Branching is kind of like coming to a fork in the code: do we take the path for people whose name == 'Chris', or else do we take the other, less fortuitous, path? (Well, I guess you could also call it the path of fame, fortune, and glory. But it’s my fortune-teller, and I say it’s less fortuitous. So there.) Clearly, branching can get pretty deep. Just like the branches of a tree, you can have branches that themselves have branches, as we can see on the next page.

www.it-ebooks.info
B RANCHING 46

puts 'Hello, and welcome to seventh grade English.' puts 'My name is Mrs. Gabbard. name = gets.chomp if name == name.capitalize puts 'Please take a seat, ' + name + '.' else puts name + '? You mean ' + name.capitalize + ', right?' puts 'Don\'t you even know how to spell your name??' reply = gets.chomp if reply.downcase == 'yes' puts 'Hmmph! else puts 'GET OUT!!' end end Well, sit down!' And your name is....?'

Hello, and welcome to seventh grade English. My name is Mrs. Gabbard. chris chris? yes Hmmph! Well, sit down! You mean Chris, right? Don't you even know how to spell your name?? And your name is....?

Fine, I’ll capitalize my name:
Hello, and welcome to seventh grade English. My name is Mrs. Gabbard. Chris Please take a seat, Chris. And your name is....?

www.it-ebooks.info
B RANCHING 47

Sometimes it might get confusing trying to figure out where all the ifs, elses, and ends go. What I do is write the end at the same time I write the if. So, as I was writing the previous program, this is how it looked first: puts 'Hello, and welcome to seventh grade English.' puts 'My name is Mrs. Gabbard. name = gets.chomp if name == name.capitalize else end And your name is....?'

Then I filled it in with comments, stuff in the code the computer will ignore: puts 'Hello, and welcome to seventh grade English.' puts 'My name is Mrs. Gabbard. name = gets.chomp if name == name.capitalize # else # end She gets mad. She's civil. And your name is....?'

Anything after a # is considered a comment (unless, of course, the # is in a string). After that, I replaced the comments with working code. Some people like to leave the comments in; personally, I think wellwritten code usually speaks for itself. (The trick, of course, is in writing well-written code.) I used to use more comments, but the more “fluent” in Ruby I become, the less I use them. I actually find them distracting much of the time. It’s a personal choice; you’ll find your own (usually evolving) style.

www.it-ebooks.info
L OOPING 48

Anyway, my next step looked like this: puts 'Hello, and welcome to seventh grade English.' puts 'My name is Mrs. Gabbard. name = gets.chomp if name == name.capitalize puts 'Please take a seat, ' + name + '.' else puts name + '? You mean ' + name.capitalize + ', right?' puts 'Don\'t you even know how to spell your name??' reply = gets.chomp if reply.downcase == 'yes' else end end And your name is....?'

Again, I wrote the if, else, and end all at the same time. It really helps me keep track of “where I am” in the code. It also makes the job seem easier because I can focus on one small part, such as filling in the code between the if and the else. The other benefit of doing it this way is that the computer can understand the program at any stage. Every one of the unfinished versions of the program I showed you would run. They weren’t finished, but they were working programs. That way I could test them as I wrote them, which helped me see how my program was coming along and where it still needed work. When it passed all the tests, I knew I was done. I strongly suggest you approach your programs in this way. These tips will help you write programs with branching, but they also help with the other main type of flow control.

7.3 Looping
Often, you’ll want your computer to do the same thing over and over again. After all, that’s what they’re supposed to be good at doing. When you tell your computer to keep repeating something, you also need to tell it when to stop. Computers never get bored, so if you don’t tell it when to stop, it won’t.

www.it-ebooks.info
L OOPING 49

We make sure this doesn’t happen by telling the computer to repeat certain parts of a program while a certain condition is true. This works kind of like how if works: input = '' while input != 'bye' puts input input = gets.chomp end puts 'Come again soon!'

Hello? Hello? Hi! Hi! Very nice to meet you. Very nice to meet you. Oh...how sweet! Oh...how sweet! bye Come again soon!

It’s not a fabulous program, though. For one thing, while tests your condition at the top of the loop. In this case we had to tweak our loop so it could test there. This made us puts a blank line before we did our first gets. In my mind, it just feels like the gets comes first and the echoing puts comes later. It’d be nice if we could say something like this:
# THIS IS NOT A REAL PROGRAM! input = gets.chomp puts input if input == 'bye' stop_looping end end puts 'Come again soon!'

while just_like_go_forever

www.it-ebooks.info
L OOPING 50

That’s not valid Ruby code, but it’s close! To get it to loop forever, we just need to give while a condition that’s always true. And Ruby does have a way to break out of a loop:
# THIS IS SO TOTALLY A REAL PROGRAM! input = gets.chomp puts input if input == 'bye' break end end puts 'Come again soon!'

while 'Spike' > 'Angel'

Hi, and your name is... Hi, and your name is... Cute. And original. Cute. And original. What, are you like... by little brother?! What, are you like... by little brother?! bye bye Come again soon!

Now, isn’t that better? OK, I’ll admit, the 'Spike' > 'Angel' thing is a little silly. When I get bored coming up with jokes for these examples, I’ll usually just use the actual true object: while true input = gets.chomp puts input if input == 'bye' break end end puts 'Come again soon!'

www.it-ebooks.info
A L ITTLE B IT OF L OGIC 51

Hey. Hey. You again?! You again?! bye bye Come again soon!

And that’s a loop. It’s considerably trickier than a branch, so take a minute to look it over and let it sink in.... Loops are lovely things. However, like high-maintenance girlfriends or bubble gum, they can cause big problems if handled improperly. Here’s a big one: what if your computer gets trapped in an infinite loop? If you think this may have happened, just go to your command line, hold down the Ctrl key, and press C . (You are running these from the command line, right?) Before we start playing around with loops, though, let’s learn a few things to make our job easier.

7.4 A Little Bit of Logic
Let’s take another look at our first branching program, on page 43. What if my wife came home, saw the program, tried it, and it didn’t tell her what a lovely name she had? I wouldn’t want her to flip out, so let’s rewrite it: puts 'Hello, what\'s your name?' name = gets.chomp puts 'Hello, ' + name + '.' if name == 'Chris' puts 'What a lovely name!' else if name == 'Katy' puts 'What a lovely name!' end end

Mind you, Katy is as lovely and sweet as she is likely to read this book, so I feel I should point out that she would never flip out about something like this. She saves that for when I’ve done something really horrible, like lose one of her James Bond DVDs.

www.it-ebooks.info
A L ITTLE B IT OF L OGIC 52

Hello, what's your name? Katy Hello, Katy. What a lovely name!

Well, it works...but it isn’t a very pretty program. Why not? It just doesn’t feel right to me that the whole “Katy” chunk of code is not lined up with the “Chris” chunk of code. These are supposed to be totally equal and symmetrical options, yet one feels distinctly subordinate to the other. (In fact, this code would probably get me sleeping on the couch faster than just leaving her out of the program altogether.) This code just isn’t jiving with my mental model. Fortunately, another Ruby construct can help: elsif. This code means the same thing as the last program but feels so much lovelier: puts 'Hello, what\'s your name?' name = gets.chomp puts 'Hello, ' + name + '.' if name == 'Chris' puts 'What a lovely name!' elsif name == 'Katy' puts 'What a lovely name!' end

Hello, what's your name? Katy Hello, Katy. What a lovely name!

This is a definite improvement, but something is still wrong. If I want the program to do the same thing when it gets Chris or Katy, then it should really do the same thing, as in execute the same code. Here we have two different lines of code doing the same thing. That’s not right. That’s not how I’m thinking about this. More pragmatically, it’s just a bad idea to duplicate code anywhere. Remember the DRY rule? Don’t Repeat Yourself! For pragmatic reasons, for aesthetic reasons, or just because you’re lazy, don’t ever repeat yourself! Weed out duplication in code (or even design) when-

www.it-ebooks.info
A L ITTLE B IT OF L OGIC 53

ever you see it. In our case, we repeated the line puts 'What a lovely name!'. What we’re trying to say is just, “If the name is Chris or Katy, do this.” Let’s just code it that way: puts 'Hello, what\'s your name?' name = gets.chomp puts 'Hello, ' + name + '.' if name == 'Chris' || name == 'Katy' puts 'What a lovely name!' end

Hello, what's your name? Katy Hello, Katy. What a lovely name!

Nice. Much, much better. And it’s even shorter! I don’t know about you, but I’m excited. It’s almost the same as the original program! Bliss, I tell you...sparkly programming bliss! To make it work, I used ||, which is how we say “or” in most programming languages. At this point, you might be wondering why we couldn’t just say this:
... if name == ('Chris' || 'Katy') puts 'What a lovely name!' end

It makes sense in English, but you have to remember how staggeringly brilliant humans are compared to computers. The reason this makes sense in English is that humans are just fabulous at dealing with context. In this context, it’s clear to a human that “if your name is Chris or Katy” means “if your name is Chris or if it is Katy.” (I even used “it”— another triumph of human context handling.) But when your computer sees ('Chris' || 'Katy'), it’s not even looking at the name == code; before it gets there, it just tries to figure out whether one of 'Chris' or 'Katy' is

www.it-ebooks.info
A L ITTLE B IT OF L OGIC 54

true...because that’s what || does. But that doesn’t really make sense, so you have to be explicit and write the whole thing. Anyway, that’s “or.” The other logical operators are && (“and”) and ! (“not”). Let’s see how they work: i_am_chris = true

i_am_purple = false i_like_beer = true i_eat_rocks = false puts i_am_chris && i_like_beer

puts i_like_beer && i_eat_rocks puts i_am_purple && i_like_beer puts i_am_purple && i_eat_rocks puts puts i_am_chris || i_like_beer puts i_like_beer || i_eat_rocks puts i_am_purple || i_like_beer puts i_am_purple || i_eat_rocks puts puts !i_am_purple puts !i_am_chris

true false false false true true true false true false

The only one of these that might trick you is ||. In English, we often use “or” to mean “one or the other, but not both.” For example, your mom might say, ”For dessert, you can have pie or cake.” She did not mean

www.it-ebooks.info
A L ITTLE B IT OF L OGIC 55

you could have them both! A computer, on the other hand, uses || to mean “one or the other, or both.” (Another way of saying it is “at least one of these is true.”) This is why computers are more fun than moms. (Obviously I think my mom is far less likely to read this book than my wife is.) Just to make sure everything is well cemented for you, let’s look at one more example before you go it alone. This will be a simulation of talking to my son, C, back when he was 2. (Just for background, when he talks about Ruby, Nono, and Emma, he is referring to his baby sister, Ruby, and his friends Giuliano and Emma. He manages to bring everyone he loves into every conversation he has. And yes, we did name our children after programming languages. And yes, my wife is the coolest woman ever.) So, without further ado, this is pretty much what happens whenever you ask C to do something: while true puts 'What would you like to ask C to do?' request = gets.chomp puts 'You say, "C, please ' + request + '"' puts 'C\'s response:' puts '"C ' + request + '."' puts '"Papa ' + request + ', too."' puts '"Mama ' + request + ', too."' puts '"Ruby ' + request + ', too."' puts '"Nono ' + request + ', too."' puts '"Emma ' + request + ', too."' puts if request == 'stop' break end end

Let’s chat with C a bit on the next page.

www.it-ebooks.info
A L ITTLE B IT OF L OGIC 56

What would you like to ask C to do? eat You say, "C, please eat" C's response: "C eat." "Papa eat, too." "Mama eat, too." "Ruby eat, too." "Nono eat, too." "Emma eat, too." What would you like to ask C to do? go potty You say, "C, please go potty" C's response: "C go potty." "Papa go potty, too." "Mama go potty, too." "Ruby go potty, too." "Nono go potty, too." "Emma go potty, too." What would you like to ask C to do? hush You say, "C, please hush" C's response: "C hush." "Papa hush, too." "Mama hush, too." "Ruby hush, too." "Nono hush, too." "Emma hush, too." What would you like to ask C to do? stop You say, "C, please stop" C's response: "C stop." "Papa stop, too." "Mama stop, too." "Ruby stop, too." "Nono stop, too." "Emma stop, too."

www.it-ebooks.info
A F EW T HINGS TO T RY 57

Yeah, that’s about what it was like. You couldn’t sneeze without hearing about Emma or Nono sneezing, too. : )

7.5 A Few Things to Try
• “99 Bottles of Beer on the Wall.” Write a program that prints out the lyrics to that beloved classic, “99 Bottles of Beer on the Wall.” • Deaf grandma. Whatever you say to Grandma (whatever you type in), she should respond with this:
HUH?! SPEAK UP, SONNY!

unless you shout it (type in all capitals). If you shout, she can hear you (or at least she thinks so) and yells back:
NO, NOT SINCE 1938!

To make your program really believable, have Grandma shout a different year each time, maybe any year at random between 1930 and 1950. (This part is optional and would be much easier if you read the section on Ruby’s random number generator on page 38.) You can’t stop talking to Grandma until you shout BYE. Hint 1: Don’t forget about chomp! 'BYE' with an Enter at the end is not the same as 'BYE' without one! Hint 2: Try to think about what parts of your program should happen over and over again. All of those should be in your while loop. Hint 3: People often ask me, “How can I make rand give me a number in a range not starting at zero?” Well, you can’t; rand just doesn’t work that way. So, I guess you’ll have to do something to the number rand returns to you. • Deaf grandma extended. What if Grandma doesn’t want you to leave? When you shout BYE, she could pretend not to hear you. Change your previous program so that you have to shout BYE three times in a row. Make sure to test your program: if you shout BYE three times but not in a row, you should still be talking to Grandma.

www.it-ebooks.info
A F EW T HINGS TO T RY 58

• Leap years. Write a program that asks for a starting year and an ending year and then puts all the leap years between them (and including them, if they are also leap years). Leap years are years divisible by 4 (like 1984 and 2004). However, years divisible by 100 are not leap years (such as 1800 and 1900) unless they are also divisible by 400 (such as 1600 and 2000, which were in fact leap years). What a mess! When you finish those, take a break! That was a lot of programming. Congratulations! You’re well on your way. Relax, have a nice cold (possibly root) beer, and continue tomorrow.

www.it-ebooks.info

Chapter 8

Arrays and Iterators
Welcome back! Let’s write a program that asks us to type in as many words as we want (one word per line, continuing until we just press Enter on an empty line) and then repeats the words back to us in alphabetical order. OK? So...first we’ll—uh...um...hmmm.... Well, we could—er...em.... You know, I don’t think we can do it. We need a way to store an unknown number of words and to keep track of them altogether so they don’t get mixed up with other variables. We need to put them in some sort of a list. We need arrays. An array is just a list in your computer. Every slot in the list acts like a variable: you can see what object a particular slot points to, and you can make it point to a different object. Let’s take a look at some arrays:
[] [5] ['Hello', 'Goodbye' ] flavor = 'vanilla' [89.9, flavor, [true, false]] # # Not an array, of course... ...but this is.

First we have an empty array, then an array holding a single number, and then an array holding two strings. Next we have a simple assignment; then we have an array holding three objects, the last of which is the array [true, false]. Remember, variables aren’t objects, so our last array is really pointing to a float, a string, and an array. (Even if we

www.it-ebooks.info
C HAPTER 8. A RRAYS AND I TERATORS 60

were to set flavor to point to something else later in the program, that wouldn’t change the array.) To help us find a particular object in an array, each slot is given an index number. Programmers (and most mathematicians) like to start counting from zero, though, so the first slot in the array is slot zero. Here’s how we would reference the objects in an array: names = ['Ada', 'Belle', 'Chris'] puts names puts puts names[0] puts names[1] puts names[2] puts names[3] # This is out of range.

Ada Belle Chris Ada Belle Chris nil

So, we see that puts names prints each name in the array names. Then we use puts names[0] to print out the first name in the array and puts names[1] to print the second. I’m sure this seems confusing, but you do get used to it. You just have to really start thinking that counting begins at zero and stop using words such as first and second. If you go out to a five-course meal, don’t talk about the first course; talk about course zero (and in your head, be thinking course[0]). You have five fingers on your right hand, and their numbers are 0, 1, 2, 3, and 4. My wife and I are jugglers. When we juggle six clubs, we are juggling clubs 0–5. In the next few months, we hope to be able to juggle club 6 (and thus be juggling seven clubs between us). You’ll know you have it when you start using the word zeroth. : )

www.it-ebooks.info
T HE M ETHOD EACH 61

Finally, we tried puts names[3], just to see what would happen. Were you expecting an error? As we’ve seen in the past, sometimes when you ask your computer a question, it just doesn’t make sense (at least to the computer); that’s when you get an error. Sometimes, however, you can ask a question, and the answer is nothing. What’s in slot three? Nothing. What is names[3]? nil : Ruby’s way of saying “nothing.” nil is a special object that means “not any other object.” Now, I said the slots in your arrays act like variables. This means you can assign to them as well. If you just had to guess what that code looked like, you’d probably guess something like this: other_peeps = [] other_peeps[3] = 'beebee Meaner' other_peeps[0] = 'Ah-ha' other_peeps[1] = 'Seedee' other_peeps[0] = 'beebee Ah-ha' puts other_peeps

Others who were in C’s oft-repeated list: baby Edison, Mercedes, and baby Melena.

beebee Ah-ha Seedee nil beebee Meaner

As you can see, you don’t have to assign to the slots in any particular order, and any you leave empty are filled with nil by default. If all this funny numbering of array slots is getting to you, fear not! Often, we can avoid them completely by using various array methods, such as each.

8.1 The Method each
The method each allows us to do something (whatever we want) to each object the array points to. (It looks weird, though, and this can throw people off, so brace yourself.)

www.it-ebooks.info
T HE M ETHOD EACH 62

For example, if we want to say something nice about each language in the following array, we could do something like this: languages = ['English' , 'Norwegian' , 'Ruby'] languages.each do |lang| puts 'I love ' + lang + '!' puts 'Don\'t you?' end puts 'And let\'s hear it for Java!' puts '<crickets chirp in the distance>'

I love English! Don't you? I love Norwegian! Don't you? I love Ruby! Don't you? And let's hear it for Java! <crickets chirp in the distance>

What just happened? (Aside from Java getting pwn3d, heh-heh.) Well, we were able to go through every object in the array without using any numbers, so that’s definitely nice. There are those weird vertical-barthingies around lang; I’ll get to that. But first, just to make sure you understand what this code means (if not necessarily why it means it), let’s translate it into English: for each object in languages, point the variable lang to the object, and then do everything I tell you to, until you come to the end. We use do and end to specify a block of code. In this case, we’re sending that block to the each method, saying “This is what I want you to do with each of the objects in the array.” Blocks are great, but a bit advanced, which is why we’re not really going to talk about them until Chapter 14, Blocks and Procs, on page 134. Until then, however, we can still use them. We just won’t talk about them. Much. Except we’ll talk about the vertical-bar-thingies, like in |lang|. It looks weird, but the idea is simple: lang is the variable that each will use to point to the objects in the array. How would we otherwise refer to the string 'English'? (Well, maybe using languages[0], but the whole point

www.it-ebooks.info
T HE M ETHOD EACH 63

here was to avoid messing with the slot numbers.) The vertical bars don’t do anything to lang; they just let each know which variable to use to feed in the objects in the array. You might be thinking to yourself, “This is a lot like the loops we learned about earlier.” Yep, it’s similar. One important difference is that the method each is just that: a method. while and end (much like do, if, else, and all the other keywords) are not methods. They are a fundamental part of the Ruby language, just like = and parentheses; they are kind of like punctuation marks in English. But this isn’t true with each; each is just another array method. Methods like each that “act like” loops are often called iterators. One thing to notice about iterators is that they are always followed by a block—that is, by some code wrapped inside do...end. On the other hand, while and if never had a do near them. Here’s another cute little iterator, but this one is not an array method:
# Go-go-gadget-integer-method... puts 'Hip-Hip-Hooray!' end

3.times do

Hip-Hip-Hooray! Hip-Hip-Hooray! Hip-Hip-Hooray!

It’s an integer method. Now you cannot tell me that ain’t the cutest code you’ve ever seen! And, as promised on page 19, here’s that pretty program again:
2.times do puts '...you can say that again...' end

...you can say that again... ...you can say that again...

www.it-ebooks.info
M ORE A RRAY M ETHODS 64

8.2 More Array Methods
We’ve learned each, but there are many other array methods, almost as many as there are string methods. In fact, some of them (such as length, reverse, +, and *) work just like they do for strings, except they operate on the slots of the array rather than on the letters of the string. Others, such as last and join, are specific to arrays. Still others, such as push and pop, actually change the array. And just as with the string methods, you don’t have to remember all of these, as long as you can remember where to find out about them (and that would be right here). Let’s look at to_s and join. join works much like to_s does, except that it adds a string in between the array’s objects. Actually, I can’t think of a time when I have ever used to_s on any array. I always use puts or join. But I know you’re dying to know how to_s works, so take a look at the following example: foods = ['artichoke' , 'brioche' , 'caramel' ] puts foods puts puts foods.to_s puts puts foods.join(' , ') puts puts foods.join(' 200.times do puts [] end :) ') + ' 8)'

Two hundred times?! No more sugar for me! artichoke brioche caramel artichokebriochecaramel artichoke, brioche, caramel artichoke :) brioche :) caramel 8)

www.it-ebooks.info
A F EW T HINGS TO T RY 65

Whew! It’s good puts treats arrays differently from other objects; that would have been a boring couple of pages if puts had written something 200 times. With arrays, puts calls puts on each of the objects in the array. That’s why calling puts on an empty array 200 times doesn’t do anything; the array doesn’t contain anything, so there’s nothing to puts. Doing nothing 200 times is still doing nothing (unless you’re playing a role-playing game, in which case you just leveled!). Try putsing an array containing other arrays; did it do what you expected? Now let’s take a look at push, pop, and last. The methods push and pop are sort of opposites, like + and - are. push adds an object to the end of your array, and pop removes the last object from the array (and tells you what it was). last is similar to pop in that it tells you what’s at the end of the array, except that it leaves the array alone. Again, push and pop actually change the array: favorites = [] favorites.push 'raindrops on roses' favorites.push 'whiskey on kittens' puts favorites[0] puts favorites.last puts favorites.length puts favorites.pop puts favorites puts favorites.length

raindrops on roses whiskey on kittens 2 whiskey on kittens raindrops on roses 1

8.3 A Few Things to Try
• Building and sorting an array. Write the program we talked about at the beginning of this chapter, one that asks us to type as many

www.it-ebooks.info
A F EW T HINGS TO T RY 66

words as we want (one word per line, continuing until we just press Enter on an empty line) and then repeats the words back to us in alphabetical order. Make sure to test your program thoroughly; for example, does hitting Enter on an empty line always exit your program? Even on the first line? And the second? Hint: There’s a lovely array method that will give you a sorted version of an array: sort. Use it! • Table of contents, revisited. Rewrite your table of contents program on page 36. Start the program with an array holding all of the information for your table of contents (chapter names, page numbers, and so on). Then print out the information from the array in a beautifully formatted table of contents.

www.it-ebooks.info

Chapter 9

Writing Your Own Methods
As we’ve seen, loops and iterators allow us to do the same thing (run the same code) over and over again. However, sometimes we want to do the same thing a number of times but from different places in the program. For example, let’s say we were writing a questionnaire program for a psychology student. From the psychology students I have known and the questionnaires they have given me, it would probably go something like this: puts 'Hello, and thank you for taking the time to' puts 'help me with this experiment. puts 'Mexican food. My experiment' puts 'has to do with the way people feel about' Just think about Mexican food' My experiment' puts 'and try to answer every question honestly,' puts 'with either a "yes" or a "no". puts # We ask these questions, but we ignore their answers. puts 'has nothing to do with bed-wetting.'

while true puts 'Do you like eating tacos?' answer = gets.chomp.downcase if (answer == 'yes' || answer == 'no') break else puts 'Please answer "yes" or "no".' end end

www.it-ebooks.info
C HAPTER 9. W RITING Y OUR O WN M ETHODS while true puts 'Do you like eating burritos?' answer = gets.chomp.downcase if (answer == 'yes' || answer == 'no') break else puts 'Please answer "yes" or "no".' end end We pay attention to *this* answer, though. while true # puts 'Do you wet the bed?' answer = gets.chomp.downcase if (answer == 'yes' || answer == 'no') if answer == 'yes' wets_bed = true else wets_bed = false end break else puts 'Please answer "yes" or "no".' end end while true puts 'Do you like eating chimichangas?' answer = gets.chomp.downcase if (answer == 'yes' || answer == 'no') break else puts 'Please answer "yes" or "no".' end end puts 'Just a few more questions...' while true puts 'Do you like eating sopapillas?' answer = gets.chomp.downcase

68

www.it-ebooks.info
C HAPTER 9. W RITING Y OUR O WN M ETHODS if (answer == 'yes' || answer == 'no') break else puts 'Please answer "yes" or "no".' end end # Ask lots of other questions about Mexican food.

69

puts puts 'DEBRIEFING:' puts 'Thank you for taking the time to help with' puts 'this experiment. In fact, this experiment' It is' The Mexican' puts 'has nothing to do with Mexican food. puts 'an experiment about bed-wetting.

puts 'food was just there to catch you off guard' puts 'in the hopes that you would answer more' puts 'honestly. puts puts wets_bed Thanks again.'

Hello, and thank you for taking the time to help me with this experiment. My experiment has to do with the way people feel about Mexican food. Just think about Mexican food and try to answer every question honestly, with either a "yes" or a "no". My experiment has nothing to do with bed-wetting. Do you like eating tacos? yes Do you like eating burritos? yes Do you wet the bed? no way! Please answer "yes" or "no". Do you wet the bed? NO Do you like eating chimichangas? yes

www.it-ebooks.info
C HAPTER 9. W RITING Y OUR O WN M ETHODS 70

Just a few more questions... Do you like eating sopapillas? yes DEBRIEFING: Thank you for taking the time to help with this experiment. In fact, this experiment has nothing to do with Mexican food. It is an experiment about bed-wetting. The Mexican food was just there to catch you off guard in the hopes that you would answer more honestly. Thanks again. false

Psych majors.... Anyway, that was a pretty long program—a long, ugly program with lots of ugly repetition. All of the sections of code around the questions about Mexican food were identical except for the food, and the bed-wetting question was only slightly different. As we’ve talked about before, repetition is a Bad Thing. Still, we can’t change the repeated code to a big loop or iterator, because sometimes we have things we want to do between questions. In situations like these, it’s best to write a method of your own. Let’s start with something small and return to the psych program later. Let’s write a method that just says “moo”: def say_moo puts 'mooooooo...' end

Um...our program didn’t say_moo. Why not? Because we didn’t tell it to. We told it how to say_moo, but we never actually said to do it. Let’s give it another shot.

www.it-ebooks.info
M ETHOD P ARAMETERS 71

def say_moo puts 'mooooooo...' end say_moo say_moo puts 'coin-coin' say_moo say_moo

mooooooo... mooooooo... coin-coin mooooooo... mooooooo...

Ahhh, much better. So, we defined the method say_moo. (Method names, like variable names, almost always start with a lowercase letter. There are a few exceptions, though, such as + or ==.) But don’t methods always have to be associated with objects? Well, yes, they do, and in this case (as with puts and gets), the method is just associated with the object representing the whole program. In Chapter 13, Creating New Classes, Changing Existing Ones, on page 122, we’ll see how to add methods to other objects. But first...

Just in case you don’t speak French, that was a French duck in the middle of the program. The ducks over there say “coin-coin,” I hear. Unfortunately, the only things I retained from Compulsory French 101 were that and a few words I’m not allowed to write (in case we ever decide to translate this book into Canadian).

9.1 Method Parameters
You may have noticed that some methods (such as gets, reverse, to_s, and so on) can just be called on an object. However, other methods (such as +, -, puts...) take parameters to tell the object how to do the method. For example, you wouldn’t just say 5+, right? You’re telling 5 to add, but you aren’t telling it what to add.

www.it-ebooks.info
L OCAL VARIABLES 72

To add a parameter to say_moo (let’s say, the number of moos), we would do the following: def say_moo number_of_moos puts 'mooooooo...' *number_of_moos end say_moo 3 puts 'oink-oink' # # This last line should give an error because the parameter is missing...

say_moo

mooooooo...mooooooo...mooooooo... oink-oink #<ArgumentError: wrong number of arguments (0 for 1)>

number_of_moos is a variable that points to the parameter passed in. I’ll

say that again, but it’s a little confusing: number_of_moos is a variable that points to the parameter passed in. So, if I type say_moo 3, then the parameter is 3, and the variable number_of_moos points to 3. As you can see, the parameter is now required. After all, what is say_moo supposed to multiply 'mooooooo...' by if you don’t give it a parameter? Your poor computer has no idea. If objects in Ruby are like nouns in English and methods are like verbs, then you can think of parameters as adverbs (like with say_moo, where the parameter told us how to say_moo) or sometimes as direct objects (like with puts, where the parameter is what gets putsed).

9.2 Local Variables
The following program has two variables: def double_this num num_times_2 = num*2 puts num.to_s+' doubled is '+num_times_2.to_s end double_this 44

www.it-ebooks.info
L OCAL VARIABLES 73

44 doubled is 88

The variables are num and num_times_2. They both sit inside the method double_this. These (and all the variables you have seen so far) are local

variables. This means they live inside the method, and they cannot leave. If you try, you will get an error: def double_this num num_times_2 = num*2 puts num.to_s+' doubled is '+num_times_2.to_s end double_this 44 puts num_times_2.to_s

44 doubled is 88 #<NameError: undefined local variable ‘num_times_2' >

Undefined local variable.... In fact, we did define that local variable, but it isn’t local to where we tried to use it; it’s local to the method, which means it’s local to double_this. This might seem inconvenient, but it’s actually quite nice. Although it does mean you have no access to variables inside methods, it also means they have no access to your variables and thus can’t screw them up, as the following example shows: tough_var = 'You can\'t even touch my variable!' def little_pest tough_var tough_var = nil puts 'HAHA! end little_pest tough_var puts tough_var I ruined your variable!'

HAHA!

I ruined your variable!

You can't even touch my variable!

www.it-ebooks.info
E XPERIMENT : D UBY 74

In fact, two variables in that little program are named tough_var: one inside little_pest and one outside of it. They don’t communicate. They aren’t related. They aren’t even friends. When we called little_pest tough_var, we really just passed the string from one tough_var to the other (via the method call, the only way they can even sort of communicate) so that both were pointing to the same string. Then little_pest pointed its own local tough_var to nil, but that did nothing to the tough_var variable outside the method.

9.3 Experiment: Duby
OK, local variables, neat trick...but maybe you’re wondering, “What’s the point?” Legitimate question, but it’s kind of hard to see the point without considering what it would be like without local variables. It’s like if you’d never seen a seatbelt, and I’m here telling you all about the different tension mechanisms, how it connects to the car, and the different kinds of latches, and you’re all, “And the point is...?” Well, imagine a world without seatbelts. You get in a wreck. You fly out the window. You die. The negative consequences of programming without local variables are certainly not as dramatic, but neither are they as easily explained. To get a feel for life without locals, let’s imagine a fake language called Duby (for Dumb Ruby). Duby is just like regular Ruby, except that all variables live in the same scope (that is, they have the same visibility). There’s no idea of local or global. Let’s say we wanted to make a method to square a number: def square x puts(x * x) end

Now we’ve used the variable x here, but we’re just using it as a placeholder. What I mean is, we could just as well have used y or my_fabulous_ number; it should make no difference, right? The whole point is to say that the square of something is just “something times something.” That’s the abstraction that methods provide. In this particular case, no matter what variable you are squaring, “the square of something” simply means “something times something.” That’s what you’re trying to say when you define this method.

www.it-ebooks.info
E XPERIMENT : D UBY 75

Now let’s say, in Duby, you wrote this: x = 5 square x

Now at this point, assuming you defined square like we did earlier, then x is pointing to 5, before and after we called square. No problem.

And what about this program (again, in Duby)? my_number = 5 square my_number

Basically it’s the same program, just with a different variable name. Now my_number is pointing to 5. But what about x? What is it pointing to? I guess it would also have to be 5. In order to use the square method, the value passed into it (5, pointed to by my_number) needs to be assigned to x (that is, have x point to it) before you can run the x * x code. So, x is 5. So far, so good. Now consider this code: x = 10 my_number = x / 2 square my_number

In this case, my_number is half of x (so it must be 5), but that means x must also have been set to 5 when we called square, even though

we had just set it to 10. And this is the big bad: calling the square method displays the squared value, but it also has the nasty side effect of resetting x to be whatever was passed in. This is Just Plain Wrong. I mean, x used to be 10! Now it’s 5! This is insane. What if we don’t want any of our variables to be changed? What if we just want to display the square of whatever number we pass in? Can we get around the problem of the unintended side effects? Maybe.

www.it-ebooks.info
R ETURN VALUES 76

We could start defining all of our methods like this: def square liauwechygfakcuewhalcufe liauwechygfakcuewhalcufe * liauwechygfakcuewhalcufe end

And we could just hope that we don’t use liauwechygfakcuewhalcufe anywhere else in the program, but that hardly seems ideal. : ) I’m not going to write code like that, and neither should you. Can’t we do better than this? What if the x used in the square method was a different x, a totally private x that we use only for the square method; it doesn’t mean “the x you were using.” It’s just a temporary name for this value. It’s just a local variable. That’s exactly what Ruby does. (And just about every other programming language.)

9.4 Return Values
You may have noticed that some methods give you something back when you call them. For example, we say gets returns a string (the string you typed in), and the + method in 5+3 (which is really 5.+(3)) returns 8. The arithmetic methods for numbers return numbers, and the arithmetic methods for strings return strings. It’s important to understand the difference between a method returning a value (returning it to the code that called the method), and your program outputting information to your screen, like puts does. Notice that 5+3 returns 8; it does not output 8 (that is, display 8 on your screen). So, what does puts return? We never cared before, but let’s look at it now: return_val = puts 'This puts returned:' puts return_val

This puts returned: nil

www.it-ebooks.info
R ETURN VALUES 77

The first puts returned nil. Though we didn’t test it, the second puts did, too; puts always returns nil. Every method has to return something, even if it’s just nil. Take a quick break, and write a program to find out what say_moo returns. Are you surprised? Well, here’s how it works: the value returned from a method is simply the last expression evaluated in the method (usually just the last line of the method). In the case of say_moo, this means it returns puts 'mooooooo...'*number_of_moos, which is just nil since puts always returns nil. If we wanted all our methods to return the string 'yellow submarine', we would just need to put that at the end of them: def say_moo number_of_moos puts 'mooooooo...' *number_of_moos 'yellow submarine' end x = say_moo 3 puts x.capitalize + ', dude...' puts x + '.'

mooooooo...mooooooo...mooooooo... Yellow submarine, dude... yellow submarine.

(I have no idea why you’d want say_moo to work that way, but there you have it.) Notice I said “the last expression evaluated” instead of simply “the last line” or even “the last expression”; it’s possible for the last line to be only a small part of an expression (like the end in an if expression), and it’s possible for the last expression not to be evaluated at all if the method has an explicit return: def favorite_food name if name == 'Lister' return 'vindaloo' end

www.it-ebooks.info
R ETURN VALUES if name == 'Rimmer' return 'mashed potatoes' end 'hard to say...maybe fried plantain?' end def favorite_drink name if name == 'Jean-Luc' 'tea, Earl Grey, hot' elsif name == 'Kathryn' 'coffee, black' else 'perhaps...horchata?' end end puts favorite_food(' Rimmer' ) puts favorite_food(' Lister' ) puts favorite_food(' Cher') puts favorite_drink(' Kathryn' ) puts favorite_drink(' Oprah') puts favorite_drink(' Jean-Luc' )

78

mashed potatoes vindaloo hard to say...maybe fried plantain? coffee, black perhaps...horchata? tea, Earl Grey, hot

Make sure you follow each of the six delicious examples. I did two different things in that program: with favorite_food I used explicit returns, and in favorite_drink I didn’t. Depending on the feel of the code, I’ll write a method one way or the other. If I’m trying to prune off special cases, I might use returns and leave the general case on the last line. If I think the options are all of relatively equal importance, I might use elsif and else like that...feels more egalitarian, you know?
I feel like I’m supposed to tell you now that it doesn’t make any difference which way you use; it is just a matter of style. But I don’t believe that. You want your code to reflect your intent, not just the solution. You want your code to be beautiful.

www.it-ebooks.info
R ETURN VALUES 79

OK, now that we can write our own methods, let’s try that psychology experiment program again. This time we’ll write a method to ask the questions for us. It will need to take the question as a parameter and return true if the person answers yes and false if they answer no. (Even though most of the time we just ignore the answer, it’s still a good idea for our method to return the answer. This way we can use it for the bed-wetting question, too.) I’m also going to shorten the greeting and the debriefing, just so this is easier to read: def ask question while true puts question reply = gets.chomp.downcase if (reply == 'yes' || reply == 'no') if reply == 'yes' answer = true else answer = false end break else puts 'Please answer "yes" or "no".' end end answer end puts 'Hello, and thank you for...' puts ask 'Do you like eating tacos?' ask 'Do you like eating burritos?' wets_bed = ask 'Do you wet the bed?' ask 'Do you like eating chimichangas?' ask 'Do you like eating sopapillas?' puts 'Just a few more questions...' ask 'Do you like drinking horchata?' ask 'Do you like eating flautas?' # # # Ignore this return value And this one Save this return value # This is what we return (true or false).

www.it-ebooks.info
A F EW T HINGS TO T RY puts puts 'DEBRIEFING:' puts 'Thank you for...' puts puts wets_bed

80

Hello, and thank you for... Do you like eating tacos? yes Do you like eating burritos? yes Do you wet the bed? no way! Please answer "yes" or "no". Do you wet the bed? NO Do you like eating chimichangas? yes Do you like eating sopapillas? yes Just a few more questions... Do you like drinking horchata? yes Do you like eating flautas? yes DEBRIEFING: Thank you for... false

Not bad, huh? We were able to add more questions (and adding questions is easy now), but our program is still quite a bit shorter. Nice...a lazy programmer’s dream.

9.5 A Few Things to Try
• Improved ask method. That ask method I showed you was OK, but I bet you could do better. Try to clean it up by removing the answer variable. You’ll have to use return to exit from the loop. (Well, it will get you out of the whole method, but it will get you out of the loop

www.it-ebooks.info
A F EW T HINGS TO T RY 81

in the process.) How do you like the resulting method? I usually try to avoid using return (a personal preference), but I might make an exception here. • Old-school Roman numerals. In the early days of Roman numerals, the Romans didn’t bother with any of this new-fangled subtraction “IX” nonsense. No sir, it was straight addition, biggest to littlest—so 9 was written “VIIII,” and so on. Write a method that when passed an integer between 1 and 3000 (or so) returns a string containing the proper old-school Roman numeral. In other words, old_roman_numeral 4 should return 'IIII'. Make sure to test your method on a bunch of different numbers. Hint: Use the integer division and modulus methods on page 37. For reference, these are the values of the letters used: I =1 C = 100 V =5 D = 500 X = 10 M = 1000 L = 50

• “Modern” Roman numerals. Eventually, someone thought it would be terribly clever if putting a smaller number before a larger one meant you had to subtract the smaller one. As a result of this development, you must now suffer. Rewrite your previous method to return the new-style Roman numerals so when someone calls roman_numeral 4, it should return 'IV'.

My bet is that it was a stone carver in some year that ended in a 9, tasked with dating public buildings or statues or something.

www.it-ebooks.info

Chapter 10

There’s Nothing New to Learn in Chapter 10
Congratulations! You’re a programmer! At this point we’ve covered most of the basics of programming. The rest of the book is pretty much just fleshing things out for you, showing a few tricks, presenting ways to save time, and so on. But it hasn’t been easy, I imagine. If your brain isn’t already hurting by this point, either you’re brilliant, you were already a programmer before picking up this book, or you do not yet comprehend the power (and terror) of what you’ve just learned. Since you’ve done so well making it this far, I’ll make you a deal: we won’t cover anything new in this chapter! We’ll just sort of...reminisce.
This should make all of our lives a bit easier. : )

10.1 Recursion
You know how to make methods, and you know how to call methods. (Your very first program did that! Ahhh, those simple days of one-line programs....) When you write methods, you’ll usually fill them with method calls. You can make methods, and they can call methods...see where I’m going with this? Yeah? No? What if you wrote a method that called itself? That’s recursion. Well, on the surface, it’s an absurd idea; if all a method did was call itself, which would just call itself again, it would loop like that forever.

www.it-ebooks.info
R ECURSION 83

(Although this is not technically a loop, it is similar; we can usually replace loops with recursion if we feel like it.) But of course, it could do other things as well and maybe call itself only some of the time. Let’s look at what our ask method from our psych program would look like with recursion instead of while loops: def ask_recursively question puts question reply = gets.chomp.downcase if true elsif reply == 'no' false else puts 'Please answer "yes" or "no".' ask_recursively question end end ask_recursively 'Do you wet the bed?' # This is the magic line. reply == 'yes'

Do you wet the bed? no way! Please answer "yes" or "no". Do you wet the bed? NO, dude! Please answer "yes" or "no". Do you wet the bed? I said, "NO!" Please answer "yes" or "no". Do you wet the bed? NOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOO!!!!! Please answer "yes" or "no". Do you wet the bed? nonononononononono Please answer "yes" or "no". Do you wet the bed? <gasp>

www.it-ebooks.info
R ECURSION 84

Please answer "yes" or "no". Do you wet the bed? yes

Oh, nice! That is smooth, with a capital Smooth...er, as they say. Wow. Now I feel kind of bad about pushing that sorry loop version onto you in the previous chapter. This one is super short, has no unnecessary variables, and has no returns; it just does what it does. Honestly, I’m a little surprised at how nice that was. I would not normally have thought of using recursion here. In general, I try to use loops when I’m going to be doing the same thing over and over again, and I use recursion when a small part of the problem resembles the whole problem; the classic example is in computing factorials. Maybe I should think about using recursion more often.... Anyway, since I brought them up and since there seems to be some universal law that every introduction to recursion involves computing factorials, we might as well give it a whirl. I’m feeling pretty rebellious, anyway, for not using factorials as my first recursion example, so look at this before the recursion police take me away: def factorial num if num < 0 return 'You can\'t take the factorial of a negative number!' end if num <= 1 1 else num * factorial(num-1) end end puts factorial(3) puts factorial(30)

As who said? Ten points if you know.

6 265252859812191058636308480000000

www.it-ebooks.info
R ECURSION 85

There you are: factorials. For those of you who had better things to do than go to math class (clearly I did not), the factorial of an integer is the product of all the integers from itself down to 1. In other words, the factorial of 3 (written 3!, as if to fool you into thinking factorials are really exciting) is just 3 times 2 times 1, or 6. And 0! is 1 (I could give you a “sound of one hand clapping” sort of argument you may or may not find satisfying, or you could just take my word for it), and the factorial of a negative number is just plain bad sportsmanship. But these examples have been sort of contrived (though I did end up really liking how ask_recursively turned out). How about a real example? When I was generating the worlds for the game Civilization III, I wanted worlds with two primary supercontinents; those tend to be a lot of fun and just sort of feel “earthy” and...real. So after I generated the land masses (which was some pretty clever programming there, too), I wanted to test them to see what the sizes of the different continents were. If there were two of relatively equal size (say, differing by a factor of 2 or less) and no others close in size, I’d say that was a pretty good world. The process, then, was something like the following: 1. Build the world. 2. Find a “continent” (which could be a one-tile island...at this point I wouldn’t know). 3. Compute its size. 4. Find another continent (making sure not to count any of them twice but also making sure each gets counted), and repeat the process. 5. Then find the largest two, and see whether they look like fun to play on. The fun part (actually, it was all fun, not just this part!) was in computing each continent’s size, because the best way to do that was recursively. Let’s look at a trimmed-down version. Let’s say we have an 11x11 world (represented as an array of arrays...basically just a grid) and that we want to find the size of the continent in the middle (that is, the continent of which tile (5,5) is a part). We don’t want to count any land

www.it-ebooks.info
R ECURSION 86

tiles belonging to any of the other continents. Also, as in Civilization III, we’ll say that tiles touching only at the corners are still considered to be on the same continent (since units could walk along diagonals). But before we get to the code, let’s solve the problem in English first. My initial plan was to look at every tile on the map, and if that tile is a land tile on the continent I’m looking for, we add 1 to the running total. The problem, though, is how do we know whether a land tile is on the same continent as some other land tile? There are ways to solve this problem, but they all seemed to be too messy; either I was keeping track of lots of information I didn’t feel like I needed or I seemed to be doing the same computation over and over again. But then I thought, hey, two tiles are on the same continent if you can walk from one to the other. (That was essentially the operating definition of continent in Civilization III.) So that’s how the code should work! First, you count the spot you are standing on (duh); in this case, that means tile (5,5). Then, you send out eight little guys, one in each direction, and tell them to count the rest of the continent in that direction. The only rule is that no one can count a tile that someone else has already counted. When those eight guys return, you add their answers to your already-running total (which is just 1, from the tile you started with), and that’s your answer. Brilliant! Except for one tiny little detail...how are those eight little guys supposed to determine the size of the continent? You just shrugged the problem onto them! The only tile you counted was the one you were standing on. This is pretty frickin’ lazy. Which is probably a good thing.... How are your eight little helpers supposed to compute the size of the continent? The same way you do! So somehow, by a bunch of little, lazy, imaginary helpers counting only the tile they are on, you get the size of the whole continent. (We still need to make sure no tile is counted twice, but we can just mark each tile as it is visited to keep track.) Without further ado, behold the magic of recursion. (OK, so there is some ado. But just a little. Only a soupçon of ado. And that’s only because I want to display all the code on a single page spread, and there isn’t enough room on this page, so I have to fill up the space with this paragraph so the code will start at the top of the next page.)

www.it-ebooks.info
R ECURSION 87

# # #

These are just to make the map easier for me to read. "M" is visually more dense than "o".

M = 'land' o = 'water' world = [[o,o,o,o,o,o,o,o,o,o,o], [o,o,o,o,M,M,o,o,o,o,o], [o,o,o,o,o,o,o,o,M,M,o], [o,o,o,M,o,o,o,o,o,M,o], [o,o,o,M,o,M,M,o,o,o,o], [o,o,o,o,M,M,M,M,o,o,o], [o,o,o,M,M,M,M,M,M,M,o], [o,o,o,M,M,o,M,M,M,o,o], [o,o,o,o,o,o,M,M,o,o,o], [o,M,o,o,o,M,o,o,o,o,o], [o,o,o,o,o,o,o,o,o,o,o]] def continent_size world, x, y if world[y][x] != 'land' # # # end # So first we count this tile... Either it's water or we already counted it, but either way, we don't want to count it now.

return 0

size = 1 world[y][x] = 'counted land' # # # # ...then we count all of the neighboring eight tiles (and, of course, their neighbors by way of the recursion). , y-1) ) )

size = size + continent_size(world, x-1, y-1) size = size + continent_size(world, x size = size + continent_size(world, x+1, y-1) size = size + continent_size(world, x-1, y size = size + continent_size(world, x+1, y

size = size + continent_size(world, x-1, y+1)

www.it-ebooks.info
R ITE OF P ASSAGE : S OR TING size = size + continent_size(world, x , y+1)

88

size = size + continent_size(world, x+1, y+1) size end puts continent_size(world, 5, 5)

Drumroll, please....
23

And there you have it. Even if the world was much, much larger and the continent was totally bizarre and oddly shaped, it would still work just fine. Well, there is actually one small bug for you to fix. This code works fine because the continent does not border the edge of the world. If it did, then when we send our little guys out (that is, call continent_size on a new tile), some of them would fall off the edge of the world (that is, call continent_size with invalid values for x and/or y), which would probably crash on the very first line of the method. It seems like the obvious way to fix this would be to do a check before each call to continent_size (sort of like sending your little guys out only if they aren’t going to fall over the edge of the world), but that would require eight separate (yet nearly identical) checks in your method. Yuck. It would be lazier to just send your guys out and have them shout back “ZERO!” if they fall off the edge of the world. (In other words, put the check right at the top of the method, very much like the check we put in to see whether the tile was uncounted land.) Go for it! Of course, you’ll have to make sure it works; test it by extending the continent to touch one (or better yet, all four) of the edges of the world. And that, my friends, is recursion. It’s not really anything new, just a new way of thinking of the same old stuff you already learned.

10.2 Rite of Passage: Sorting
Remember the sorting program you wrote on page 65 where you asked for a list of words, sorted it, and then displayed the sorted list? The program was made much easier because you used the array’s sort method. But, like the Jedi who constructs his own lightsaber, you’ll exhibit a

www.it-ebooks.info
R ITE OF P ASSAGE : S OR TING 89

greater mastery if you write your own sorting method. Hey, we’ve all done it. It’s not easy, but this kind of problem solving is part of nearly every program you’ll write, so you’d best get your practice now. But where do you begin? Much like with continent_size, it’s probably best to try to solve the problem in English first. Then translate it into Ruby when you’ve wrapped your head around it. So, we want to sort an array of words, and we know how to find out which of two words comes first in the dictionary (using <). What strikes me as probably the easiest way to do this is to keep two more lists around: one will be our list of already-sorted words, and the other will be our list of still-unsorted words. We’ll take our list of words, find the “smallest” word (that is, the word that would come first in the dictionary), and stick it at the end of the already-sorted list. All of the other words go into the still-unsorted list. Then you do the same thing again but using the still-unsorted list instead of your original list: find the smallest word, move it to the sorted list, and move the rest to the unsorted list. Keep going until your still-unsorted list is empty. That doesn’t sound too bad, but it’s keeping all of the details straight that makes it so tricky. Go ahead and try it, and see how it looks. In fact, try it twice: once using recursion and once without. With the recursion, you might need a wrapper method, a tiny method that wraps up another method into a cute little package, like this: def sort some_array end def recursive_sort unsorted_array, sorted_array # end Your fabulous code goes here. # This "wraps" recursive_sort.

recursive_sort some_array, []

What was the point of the wrapper method? Well, recursive_sort took two parameters, but if you were just trying to sort an array, you would always have to pass in an empty array as the second parameter. This is a silly thing to have to remember. Here, the wrapper method passes it in for us, so we never have to think about it again. When you’re done, make sure to test your code! Type in duplicate words and things like that. A great way to test would be to use the built-in

www.it-ebooks.info
A F EW T HINGS TO T RY sort method to get a sorted version of your list right away. Then, after 90

you have sorted it for yourself, make sure the two lists are equal.

10.3 A Few Things to Try
• Shuffle. Now that you’ve finished your new sorting algorithm, how about the opposite? Write a shuffle method that takes an array and returns a totally shuffled version. As always, you’ll want to test it, but testing this one is trickier: How can you test to make sure you are getting a perfect shuffle? What would you even say a perfect shuffle would be? Now test for it. • Dictionary sort. Your sorting algorithm is pretty good, sure. But there was always that sort of embarrassing point you were hoping I’d just sort of gloss over, right? About the capital letters? Your sorting algorithm is good for general-purpose sorting, but when you sort strings, you are using the ordering of the characters in your fonts (called the ASCII codes) rather than true dictionary ordering. In a dictionary, case (upper or lower) is irrelevant to the ordering. So, make a new method to sort words (something like dictionary_sort). Remember, though, that if I give your program words starting with capital letters, it should return words with those same capital letters, just ordered as you’d find in a dictionary.

10.4 One More Example
I think another example method would be helpful here. We’ll call this one english_number. It will take a number, like 22, and return the English version of it (in this case, the string 'twenty-two'). For now, let’s have it work only on integers from 0 to 100: def english_number number # We accept numbers from 0 to 100. return 'Please enter a number zero or greater.' end if number > 100 return 'Please enter a number 100 or less.' end if number < 0

www.it-ebooks.info
O NE M ORE E XAMPLE num_string = '' # # # # # left left "left" # This is the string we will return.

91

is how much of the number we still have left to write out.

"write" is the part we are writing out right now. write and left... get it? = number # # How many hundreds left? Subtract off those hundreds. = left - write*100 :)

write = left/100

if write > 0 return 'one hundred' end write = left/10 left = left - write*10 # # How many tens left? Subtract off those tens.

if write > 0 if write == 1 # # # if # Uh-oh... Since we can't write "tenty-two" instead of "twelve", we have to make a special exception for these. left == 0 num_string = num_string + 'ten' elsif left == 1 num_string = num_string + 'eleven' elsif left == 2 num_string = num_string + 'twelve' elsif left == 3 num_string = num_string + 'thirteen' elsif left == 4 num_string = num_string + 'fourteen' elsif left == 5 num_string = num_string + 'fifteen' elsif left == 6 num_string = num_string + 'sixteen' elsif left == 7 num_string = num_string + 'seventeen' elsif left == 8 num_string = num_string + 'eighteen'

www.it-ebooks.info
O NE M ORE E XAMPLE elsif left == 9 num_string = num_string + 'nineteen' end # # Since we took care of the digit in the ones place already, we have nothing left to write.

92

left = 0 elsif write == 2 num_string = num_string + 'twenty' elsif write == 3 num_string = num_string + 'thirty' elsif write == 4 num_string = num_string + 'forty' elsif write == 5 num_string = num_string + 'fifty' elsif write == 6 num_string = num_string + 'sixty' elsif write == 7 num_string = num_string + 'seventy' elsif write == 8 num_string = num_string + 'eighty' elsif write == 9 num_string = num_string + 'ninety' end if left > 0 num_string = num_string + '-' end end write = left left = 0 # # How many ones left to write out? Subtract off those ones.

if write > 0 if write == 1 num_string = num_string + 'one' elsif write == 2 num_string = num_string + 'two' elsif write == 3 num_string = num_string + 'three' elsif write == 4 num_string = num_string + 'four'

www.it-ebooks.info
O NE M ORE E XAMPLE elsif write == 5 num_string = num_string + 'five' elsif write == 6 num_string = num_string + 'six' elsif write == 7 num_string = num_string + 'seven' elsif write == 8 num_string = num_string + 'eight' elsif write == 9 num_string = num_string + 'nine' end end if num_string == '' # # end # # # end If we got this far, then we had a number somewhere in between 0 and 100, so we need to return "num_string". The only way "num_string" could be empty is if "number" is 0.

93

return 'zero'

num_string

puts english_number( puts english_number(

0) 9)

puts english_number( 10) puts english_number( 11) puts english_number( 17) puts english_number( 32) puts english_number( 88) puts english_number( 99) puts english_number(100)

Well, I certainly don’t like this program very much. First, it has too much repetition. Second, it doesn’t handle numbers greater than 100. Third, it has too many special cases and too many returns. Let’s use some arrays and try to clean it up a bit. Plus, we can use recursion for handling large numbers, since when we write out 123,123,123 (giving

www.it-ebooks.info
O NE M ORE E XAMPLE 94

us “one hundred twenty-three million, one hundred twenty-three thousand, one hundred twenty-three”), we write “one hundred twenty-three” exactly the same three times. So, here we go: def english_number number if number < 0 end if number == 0 return 'zero' end # No more special cases! # No more returns! # No negative numbers. return 'Please enter a number that isn\'t negative.'

num_string = ''

This is the string we will return. 'two', 'five', 'eight', 'twenty', 'fifty', 'eighty', 'twelve', 'fifteen' , 'three', 'six', 'nine'] 'thirty', 'sixty', 'ninety'] 'thirteen' , 'sixteen' ,

ones_place = ['one', 'four', 'seven', tens_place = ['ten', 'forty', 'seventy' , teenagers = ['eleven', 'fourteen' ,

'seventeen' , 'eighteen' , 'nineteen' ] # # # # # left left "left" is how much of the number we still have left to write out. "write" is the part we are writing out right now. write and left...get it? = number # # How many hundreds left? Subtract off those hundreds. = left - write*100 :)

write = left/100

if write > 0 # Now here's the recursion: = english_number write hundreds

num_string = num_string + hundreds + ' hundred'

www.it-ebooks.info
O NE M ORE E XAMPLE if left > 0 # end end write = left/10 left = left - write*10 # # How many tens left? Subtract off those tens. So we don't write 'two hundredfifty-one' ... num_string = num_string + ' '

95

if write > 0 if ((write == 1) and (left > 0)) # # # # # # # else num_string = num_string + tens_place[write-1] # # end if left > 0 # end end write = left left = 0 # # How many ones left to write out? Subtract off those ones. So we don't write 'sixtyfour' ... num_string = num_string + '-' The "-1" is because tens_place[3] is 'forty', not 'thirty'. Since we can't write "tenty-two" instead of "twelve", we have to make a special exception for these. The "-1" is because teenagers[3] is 'fourteen' , not 'thirteen' . Since we took care of the digit in the ones place already, we have nothing left to write.

num_string = num_string + teenagers[left-1]

left = 0

if write > 0 num_string = num_string + ones_place[write-1] # # end The "-1" is because ones_place[3] is 'four', not 'three'.

www.it-ebooks.info
O NE M ORE E XAMPLE
# end puts english_number( puts english_number( 0) 9) Now we just return "num_string"...

96

num_string

puts english_number( 10) puts english_number( 11) puts english_number( 17) puts english_number( 32) puts english_number( 88) puts english_number( 99) puts english_number(100) puts english_number(101) puts english_number(234) puts english_number(3211) puts english_number(999999) puts english_number(1000000000000)

zero nine ten eleven seventeen thirty-two eighty-eight ninety-nine one hundred one hundred one two hundred thirty-four thirty-two hundred eleven ninety-nine hundred ninety-nine hundred ninety-nine one hundred hundred hundred hundred hundred hundred

Ahhhh...that’s much, much better. The program is fairly dense, which is why I put in so many comments. It even works for large numbers, though not quite as nicely as one would hope. For example, I think 'one trillion' would be a nicer return value for that last number, or even 'one million million' (though all three are correct). In fact, you can do that right now....

www.it-ebooks.info
A F EW M ORE T HINGS TO T RY 97

10.5 A Few More Things to Try
• Expanded english_number. First, put in thousands; it should return 'one thousand' instead of (the sad) 'ten hundred' and 'ten thousand' instead of 'one hundred hundred'. Now expand upon english_number some more. For example, put in millions so you get 'one million' instead of 'one thousand thousand'. Then try adding billions, trillions, and so on. • Wedding number. How about wedding_number? It should work almost the same as english_number, except it should insert the word and all over the place, returning things like 'nineteen hundred and seventy and two', or however wedding invitations are supposed to look. I’d give you more examples, but I don’t fully understand it myself. You might need to contact a wedding coordinator to help you. (I’m really just kidding. You don’t have to do this one. I didn’t even do this one.) • “Ninety-nine Bottles of Beer on the Wall.” Using english_number and your old program on page 57, write out the lyrics to this song the right way this time. Punish your computer: have it start at 9999. (Don’t pick a number too large, though, because writing all of that to the screen takes your computer quite a while. A hundred thousand bottles of beer takes some time; and if you pick a million, you’ll be punishing yourself as well!)

www.it-ebooks.info

Chapter 11

Reading and Writing, Saving and Loading, Yin and...Something Else
Now if you were sitting here next to me, you’d probably ask why I didn’t put on any clothes before you came over. (Well, I didn’t know you were coming; you weren’t here like ten seconds ago.) But if you had given more warning and I was wearing clothes, you’d be more likely to say something like, “Chris” (and it’s a good thing you started with my name, because as anyone near and dear to me will tell you, it’s best to make sure you have my attention before striking up a conversation, lest I interrupt you 45 seconds later with, “You aren’t talking to me, are you? Uh...eel paste in your chair...what?”). “Chris,” you might say, “I still can’t write a program that really does anything.” And I’d say, “Yep.”

11.1 Doing Something
So far, after your program is done running, there’s really no evidence that it ever ran (aside from your memory of it). Nothing on your computer has been changed at all. The least I can do is show how to save the output of your program. For example, let’s say you wanted to save the output of your nifty new “99 Bottles of Beer on the Wall” program. All you have to do is add a little bit onto the command line when you run it: ruby 99bottles.rb > lyrics.txt

www.it-ebooks.info
T HE T HING A BOUT C OMPUTERS ... 99

That’s not even really programming; that’s just a command-line trick. And it’s not a terribly exciting one, since you can’t really use it for a program with any kind of interactivity or to save to more than one file or to save at a time other than the end of the program.... But, hey—it’s something. What’s happening is that all of the program’s output (from all of the putses) is being grabbed and funneled to the named file instead of being printed on your screen.

11.2 The Thing About Computers...
Before we get to real saving and loading, you and I need to talk about something. Something important. It’s about computers. The thing about computers—desktops, laptops, cell phones, you name it—is that, well, they suck. This is not by nature, mind you—it isn’t intrinsic—and I yearn for the day when they won’t suck. But for the moment, by (poor) design, they do. This is most powerfully seen when your computer loses a bunch of your information. A few years back I was working on a project (thankfully I was the only one on the project at the time). To make a long story short, I dropped the database. All of the information in the database—gone. The very structure of the database (which was itself days and days of work for me)—gone. It was all just gone. It felt like Scotty had beamed up my stomach but forgot the rest of me. I walked around for several hours, just feeling sick, not punching things that would certainly have injured my hand, muttering, “I can’t believe I dropped the database....” It was horrible. You know how I did it? It was a mouse-click about 15 pixels too high, followed by a totally reflexive (at that point) hitting of the OK button on the confirmation pop-up. And it was all gone. User error, you say? Yeah, I suppose it was. I certainly blamed myself. But at some point you have to ask yourself, why is it so fast and so easy to screw things up so catastrophically? At some point you have to start blaming the computer. Anyway, I’m telling you this because now that your programs can actually do something, it means they can do something bad. Now you have to be careful. Make backups. Make them on different computers if you can. Look into source code management systems. (I use Mercurial, and I love it.) I tend to favor things like Gmail, where I can use it from any machine (just in case my main computer melts...it happened once, with

www.it-ebooks.info
S AVING AND L OADING FOR G ROWN -U PS 100

actual melting) and where it’s someone else’s job to make sure I don’t lose anything important. From this point on, just be careful, OK?

11.3 Saving and Loading for Grown-Ups
Now that you’re good and afraid, let’s get to it. A file is basically just a sequence of bytes. A string is also, ultimately, just a sequence of bytes. This makes saving strings to files pretty easy, at least conceptually. (And Ruby makes it pretty easy in practice.) Here’s a quick example where we save a simple string to a file and then read it back out again. (I’ll just show you the program first, and then I’ll talk some more about it.)
# # # The filename doesn't have to end with ".txt", but since it is valid text, why not? = 'ListerQuote.txt' 'I will never mention gazpacho soup again.' # # The 'w' here is for write-access to the file, since we are trying to write to it. f.write test_string end read_string = File.read filename puts(read_string == test_string)

filename

test_string = 'I promise that I swear absolutely that ' +

File.open filename, 'w' do |f|

true

File.open is how you open a file, of course. It creates the file object, calls it f (because that’s what we said to call it), runs all the code until it gets to the end, and then closes the file. When you open a file, you always have to close it again. In most programming languages you have to remember to do this, but Ruby takes care of it for you at the

www.it-ebooks.info
YAML end. Reading files is even easier than writing them; with File.read Ruby 101

takes care of everything behind the scenes. (I’m not sure why they made writing more complicated, but we’ll fix that in just a bit.) Well, that’s all well and good if all you want to save and load are single strings. But what if you wanted to save an array of strings? Or an array of integers and floats? And what about all of the other classes of objects that we don’t even cover until the next chapter? What about the bunnies? All right, one thing at a time. Now we can definitely save any kind of object, just as long as we have some well-defined way of converting from a general object to a string and back again. So, maybe an array would be represented as text separated by commas. But what if you wanted to save a string with commas? Well, maybe you could escape the commas somehow.... Figuring this all out would take us a ridiculous amount of time. I mean, it’s pretty cool that you can do it at all, but you didn’t pay good money for “pretty cool.” No sir, this is a De-Luxe-Supremium book you have here. And for that, my friend, we need some serious saving. We need some full-frontal loading. Yes, when you’re looking for De-LuxeSupremium, you want YAML.

11.4 YAML
What is YAML? To know what YAML is, you have to see it for yourself. Or you could see a movie about it. Or I could just tell you. YAML is a format for representing objects as strings. You can use other formats, but YAML is nice because it’s human-readable (and humaneditable) as well as computer-readable. My wife actually writes YAML all the time, right there in her text editor. Then another program reads it in later. Pretty cool. YAML is not actually part of the Ruby core (it is its own thing, and many other languages can use YAML), but it is part of the standard distribution. What does that mean? Well, when you install Ruby, you install YAML, too. But if you want to actually use YAML, you’ll need to import it into your program. This is really easy, though, with the require method.
The thing with geeky acronyms is that they are often recursive (which, hey, that’s pretty cute, you’ve got to admit) and rarely informative (as likely to tell you what they aren’t as what they are). Take LINUX, for example: Linux Is Not Uncle Xenophobe. There you go. Anyway, I think YAML stands for Yaml Ate My Landlord.

www.it-ebooks.info
YAML 102

require 'yaml'

#

Told you it was easy.

test_array = ['Give Quiche A Chance', 'Mutants Out!', 'Chameleonic Life-Forms, No Thanks'] # # # Here's half of the magic: You see? Kind of like "to_s", and it is in fact a string,

test_string = test_array.to_yaml but it's a YAML description of "test_array".

filename = 'RimmerTShirts.txt' File.open filename, 'w' do |f| f.write test_string end read_string = File.read filename # And the other half of the magic:

read_array = YAML::load read_string puts(read_string == test_string) puts(read_array == test_array )

true true

Simple. Just two extra lines of code (well, three if you count the require line at the top). So, I’m sure the question burning in all of our hearts is “What does the YAML string look like?!” Run it yourself, and you’ll see this in RimmerTShirts.txt:
--- Give Quiche A Chance - Mutants Out! - "Chameleonic Life-Forms, No Thanks"

www.it-ebooks.info
D IVERSION : D OUBLE -Q UOTED S TRINGS 103

Pretty clear. I’m not sure why that last line is in double quotes— perhaps because of the dash? I wouldn’t be surprised if leaving out the quotes worked, too; YAML is very forgiving...I think it added the quotes only for our benefit. (A quick check says yes, indeed, we can leave those quotes out.) Wait a second, wait a second...I said that we were saving and loading only one string. But that file has four lines in it. What, one may be well-justified in asking, gives? Well, it is one string. It’s a four-line string. How does a string get to have four lines? It has three newline characters. You can add newline characters to strings by just hitting Enter in your code and continuing your string on the next line, though that doesn’t play well with proper indentation and ends up looking ugly. There are somewhat less ugly ways of dealing with it, but they require a different way of defining strings. When we want to make a string, we enclose some text in single quotes, and viola! A string. But there are other ways—like, five other ways—to define strings. I don’t even know what they all are. To learn them all, there are great references out there (I’ll point them out in Chapter 15, Beyond This Fine Book, on page 145), but in the meantime, let’s just learn one more that is commonly used....

11.5 Diversion: Double-Quoted Strings
So far, we’ve used only single-quoted strings. They are the easiest to use, in the same sense that a shovel is easier to use than a backhoe: when the job gets big enough, it stops being easier. Consider multiline strings: buffy_quote_1 = '\'Kiss rocks\' ? Why would anyone want to kiss... Oh, wait. I get it.' buffy_quote_2 = "'Kiss rocks'?\n" + "Why would anyone want to kiss...\n" + "Oh, wait. I get it." puts buffy_quote_1 puts puts(buffy_quote_1 == buffy_quote_2)

www.it-ebooks.info
D IVERSION : D OUBLE -Q UOTED S TRINGS 104

'Kiss rocks'? Why would anyone want to kiss... Oh, wait. I get it. true

Using double quotes, we can indent the strings so they all line up. You’ll notice the "\n", which is the escape sequence for the newline character. With this, you can also put a multiline string on one line of code: puts "3...\n2...\n1...\nHAPPY NEW YEAR!"

3... 2... 1... HAPPY NEW YEAR!

But it doesn’t work with the simpler single-quoted strings: puts '3...\n2...\n1...\nHAPPY NEW YEAR!'

3...\n2...\n1...\nHAPPY NEW YEAR!

And just as you must escape single quotes in single-quoted strings (but not double quotes), you must escape double quotes in double-quoted strings (but not single quotes): puts 'single (\') and double (") quotes' puts "single (') and double (\") quotes"

single (') and double (") quotes single (') and double (") quotes

So, that’s double-quoted strings. In most cases, I prefer the simplicity of single-quoted strings, honestly. But there’s one thing that doublequoted strings do very nicely: interpolation. It’s sort of a cross between string addition, to_s conversion, and salsa. (The food or the dance—pick whichever metaphor works best for you.)

www.it-ebooks.info
B ACK TO O UR R EGULARLY S CHEDULED P ROGRAMMING 105

name = 'Luke' zip = 90210

puts "Name = #{name}, Zipcode = #{zip}"

Name = Luke, Zipcode = 90210

Snazzy, no? We got to use the variable names right in the string, just by putting it inside "#{...}". And you’ll notice that we didn’t have to say zip.to_s to convert the ZIP code to a string; Ruby knows that you want it to be a string in this case, so it does the conversion for you. But it gets even better! You’re not limited to variables when using string interpolation—you can use any expression you want! Ruby evaluates the expression for you, converts to string, and injects the result into the surrounding string: puts "#{2 * 10**4 + 1} Leagues Under the Sea, THE REVENGE!"

20001 Leagues Under the Sea, THE REVENGE!

Good stuff. (Don’t say I never gave you nothing.)

11.6 Back to Our Regularly Scheduled Programming
Now where were we? Ah, yes, YAML. As I was saying, YAML takes (or returns) a multiline string. Go ahead and play around with your YAML code. Get familiar with it. Toss in some arrays within arrays; try to fool it with the integer 42 as opposed to the string '42' or with the true object as opposed to the string 'true'. YAML is pretty smart and, if I may be so bold, darned convenient. You know what would be even better, though? It would be cool if I could just save an object with one method call, just one line of code. And it’d be cool if I could load with just one method call, too. Check it, yo!

www.it-ebooks.info
B ACK TO O UR R EGULARLY S CHEDULED P ROGRAMMING 106

require 'yaml' # First we define these fancy methods...

def yaml_save object, filename File.open filename, 'w' do |f| f.write(object.to_yaml) end end def yaml_load filename yaml_string = File.read filename YAML::load yaml_string end # ...and now we use these fancy methods.

test_array = ['Slick Shoes', 'Bully Blinders' , 'Pinchers of Peril'] # # # Hey, time for some "me" trivia: In Portland once, I met the guy who played Troy's dad. True story.

filename = 'DatasGadgets.txt' # We save it...

yaml_save test_array, filename # We load it...

read_array = yaml_load filename # We weep for the po' fools that ain't got it...

puts(read_array == test_array)

true

www.it-ebooks.info
R ENAMING Y OUR P HOTOS 107

Who’s your daddy? Or at the very least an acquaintance of his? Or maybe just knows that you have a daddy? That’s right, baby, it’s me.

11.7 Renaming Your Photos
Let’s do something really useful now. A day ago I got an email from someone wanting to know how to rename a bunch of files. A year ago my wife wanted a program to download the pictures from her camera’s memory card and rename them. I’ll show you a modified version of her program. But first, we ought to talk about a few new methods we’ll be using in this program. The first is the Dir[] method. We’ve seen [] used with arrays before...you did know that was a method, didn’t you? Oh, yeah, it sure is. You say “arr[2]” and I say “arr.[ ] 2”—it’s all the same. Anyway, rather than using an array’s [] method, we’re using the object Dir’s [] method. (The Dir is for directory.) And instead of passing in a number, like with arrays, this time you pass in a string. This is not just any string; it’s a string describing which filenames you are looking for. It then searches for those files and returns an array of the filenames (strings) it found. The format of the input string is pretty easy. It’s basically just a filename with a few extra goodies. In fact, if you just pass in a filename, you’ll get either an array containing the filename (if the file exists) or an empty array (if it doesn’t). puts Dir['ParisHilton.jpg' ]

For simplicity, I’m just going to say “filename” when I really mean “absolute or relative path and filename.”

Naturally, it didn’t find anything...what kind of programmer do you think I am? Anyway, I could search for all JPEGs with Dir['*.jpg']. Actually, since these are case-sensitive searches, I should probably include the allcaps version as well, Dir['*.{JPG,jpg}'], which roughly means “Find me all files starting with whatever and ending with a dot and either JPG or jpg.” Of course, that searches for JPEGs only in the current working directory, which (unless you change it) is the directory you ran the program from. To search in the parent directory, you’d want something like Dir['../*.{JPG,jpg}']. If you wanted to search in the current directory

There are more things you can do with Dir[]; I don’t even know what they all are. This will be enough for us, though.

www.it-ebooks.info
R ENAMING Y OUR P HOTOS 108

and all subdirectories (a recursive search), you’d want something like Dir['**/*.{JPG,jpg}']. And remember I said you could change your current working directory? You do that with Dir.chdir; just pass in the path to your new working directory. We’ll also be using File.rename. It should be fairly obvious how it works. I have one thing to say about renaming, though. According to your computer, moving a file and renaming a file are really the same task. Often, only one of these is presented as an option. And, if you think about, this kind of makes sense. If you rename a file from ThingsToWrite/book.txt to ThingsToRead/book.txt, you just moved that file. And if you move a file to the same location, but with a different name, you have renamed it. The last new method we’ll be using is print, which is almost exactly like puts, except it doesn’t advance to the next line. I don’t use it that often, but it’s nice for making little progress bars and things. Finally, let me tell you a bit about my wife’s computer. It’s a Windows machine, so the absolute paths are going to be C:/is/for/cook.ie and such. Also, her F:/ drive is really her card reader for her camera’s memory card. We’re going to move the files to a folder on her hard disk and rename them as we do so. (And since, as we all know, move and rename are the same thing, we’ll do this in one fell swoop. Fell stroke? How does that go?)
# # # # # # # For Katy, with love. (I always write little notes in the programs I write for her. I deleted all of the dirty ones, though, so that one is all that's left.) This is where she stores her pictures before she gets her YAML on and moves them to the server. Just for my own convenience, I'll go there now.

Yes, I’m using forward slashes. Yes, Windows uses backslashes. Yes, it’s perfectly OK to use forward slashes in Ruby. This helps make Ruby programs more cross-platform (though obviously not this one—it runs only on Katy’s machine).

Dir.chdir 'C:/Documents and Settings/Katy/PictureInbox' # First we find all of the pictures to be moved.

pic_names = Dir['F:/**/*.{JPG,jpg}' ] puts 'What would you like to call this batch?' batch_name = gets.chomp

www.it-ebooks.info
R ENAMING Y OUR P HOTOS puts print "Downloading #{pic_names.length} files: # # This will be our counter. "

109

We'll start at 1 today,

though normally I like to count from 0.

pic_number = 1 pic_names.each do |name| print '.' # This is our "progress bar".

new_name = if pic_number < 10 "batch_name0#{pic_number}.jpg" else "batch_name#{pic_number}.jpg" end # # # # # # # # # # # # # # # This renames the picture, but since "name" has a big long path on it, and "new_name" doesn't, it also moves the file to the current working directory, which is now Katy's PictureInbox folder. Since it's a *move*, this effectively downloads and deletes the originals. And since this is a memory card, not a hard drive, each of these takes a second or so; hence, the little dots let her know that my program didn't hose her machine. (Some marriage advice from your favorite author/programmer: little things.) Now where were we? Oh, yeah... it's all about the

File.rename name, new_name # end puts # This is so we aren't on progress bar line. Finally, we increment the counter.

pic_number = pic_number + 1

puts 'Done, cutie!'

www.it-ebooks.info
A F EW T HINGS TO T RY 110

Nice! Of course, the full program I wrote for her also downloads the movies, deletes the thumbnails from the camera (since only the camera can use them), extracts the time and date from the actual .jpg or .avi file, and renames the file using that. It also makes sure never to copy over an existing file. Yep, it’s a pretty fancy program, but that’s for another day.

11.8 A Few Things to Try
• Safer picture downloading. Adapt the picture-downloading/filerenaming program to your computer by adding some safety features to make sure you never overwrite a file. A few methods you might find useful are File.exist? (pass it a filename, and it will return true or false) and exit (like if return and Napoleon had a baby—it kills your program right where it stands; this is good for spitting out an error message and then quitting). • Build your own playlist. For this to work, you need to have some music ripped to your computer in some format. We’ve ripped a 100 or so CDs, and we keep them in directories something like music/genre/artist_and_cd_name/track_number.ogg. (I’m partial to the .ogg format, though this would work just as well with .mp3s or whatever you use.) Building a playlist is easy. It’s just a regular text file (no YAML required, even). Each line is a filename, like this: music/world/Stereolab--Margarine_Eclipse/track05.ogg The first time I wrote this program, I forgot that little line that increments the counter. What happened? It copied every picture to the same new filename...over the previous picture! This effectively deleted every picture except for the last one to be copied. Good thing I always, always, always make backups. Because, you know, the thing about computers....

What makes it a playlist? Well, you have to give the file the .m3u extension, like playlist.m3u or something. And that’s all a playlist is: a text file with an .m3u extension. So, have your program search for various music files and build you a playlist. Use your shuffle method on page 90 to mix up your playlist. Then check it out in your favorite music player (Winamp, MPlayer, and so on)! • Build a better playlist. After listening to playlists for a while, you might start to find that a purely random shuffle just doesn’t quite seem...mixed up enough. (Random and mixed up are not at all

www.it-ebooks.info
A F EW T HINGS TO T RY 111

the same thing. Random is totally clumpy.) For example, here’s an excerpt from a playlist I made a while back of Thelonius Monk and Faith No More: music/Jazz/Monk--Nutty/track08.ogg music/Jazz/Monk--London_Collection_1/track05.ogg music/Jazz/Monk--Nutty/track13.ogg music/Jazz/Monk--Round_Midnight/track02.ogg music/Jazz/Monk--Round_Midnight/track14.ogg music/Jazz/Monk--Round_Midnight/track15.ogg music/Jazz/Monk--Round_Midnight/track08.ogg music/Rock/FNM--Who_Cares_A_Lot_2/track02.ogg music/Rock/FNM--Who_Cares_A_Lot_2/track08.ogg music/Rock/FNM--Who_Cares_A_Lot_1/track02.ogg music/Rock/FNM--Who_Cares_A_Lot_2/track01.ogg

Hey! I asked for random! Well, that’s exactly what I got...but I wanted mixed up. So, here’s the grand challenge: instead of using your old shuffle, write a new music_shuffle method. It should take an array of filenames (like those listed previously) and mix them up good and proper. You’ll probably need to use the split method for strings. It returns an array of chopped-up pieces of the original string, split where you specify, like this: awooga = 'this/is/not/a/daffodil' .split '/' puts awooga

this is not a daffodil

Mix it up as best you can!

www.it-ebooks.info

Chapter 12

New Classes of Objects
So far we’ve seen several kinds, or classes, of objects: strings, integers, floats, arrays, a few special objects (true, false, and nil), and so on. In Ruby, these class names are always capitalized: String, Integer, Float, Array, File, and Dir. (You remember back on page 100 when we asked the File class to open a file for us, and it handed us back an actual file, which we called, in a fit of rabid creativity, f? Those were the days.... Anyway, we never ended up needing an actual directory object from Dir, but we could have gotten one if we had asked nicely.)
File.open was a mildly unusual way to get an object from a class. In

general, you’ll use the new method: alpha = Array.new beta karma = Time.new puts "alpha = #{alpha}" puts "beta = #{beta}" puts "karma = #{karma}" + [12345] # # # Array addition. String addition. Current date and time.

= String.new + 'hello'

alpha = 12345 beta = hello karma = Wed Jul 22 11:42:21 -0500 2009

Because we can create array and string literals using [...] and '... ', we rarely create them using new. (Though it might not be clear from the example there, String.new creates an empty string, and Array.new creates an empty array.) Also, numbers are special exceptions: you can’t create

www.it-ebooks.info
T HE T IME C LASS 113

an integer with Integer.new. (Which one would it create, you know?) You can make one only using an integer literal (just writing it out as you’ve been doing).

12.1 The Time Class
What’s the story with this Time class? Time objects represent (you guessed it) moments in time. You can add (or subtract) numbers to (or from) times to get new times; adding 1.5 to a time makes a new time one-and-a-half seconds later: time = Time.new # # The moment we ran this code. One minute later.

time2 = time + 60 puts time puts time2

Wed Jul 22 11:42:21 -0500 2009 Wed Jul 22 11:43:21 -0500 2009

You can also make a time for a specific moment using Time.local: puts Time.local(2000, 1, 1) puts Time.local(1976, 8, 3, 13, 31) # # Y2K. When I was born.

Sat Jan 01 00:00:00 -0500 2000 Tue Aug 03 13:31:00 -0400 1976

You’ll notice the -0400 and -0500 in these times. That’s to account for the difference between the local time and Greenwich mean time (GMT, the One True Time Zone, dontcha know). This can be because of being in a different time zone or daylight saving time or who knows what else. So, you can see that I was born in daylight saving time, while it was not daylight saving time when Y2K struck. (By the way, the parentheses are to group the parameters to local together; otherwise, puts might start thinking those are its parameters.) The more parameters you add to local, the more accurate your time becomes. On the other hand, if you want to avoid time zones and daylight saving time altogether and just use GMT, there’s always Time.gm.

www.it-ebooks.info
T HE T IME C LASS 114

puts Time.gm(1955, 11, 5)

#

A red-letter day.

Sat Nov 05 00:00:00 UTC 1955

You can compare times using the comparison methods (an earlier time is less than a later time), and if you subtract one time from another, you’ll get the number of seconds between them. Play around with it! There’s really only one snag with the Time class. It thinks the world began at epoch: the stroke of midnight, January 1, 1970, GMT. I don’t really know of any satisfying way of explaining this, but here goes: at some point, probably before I was even born, some people (Unix folks, I believe) decided that a good way to represent time on computers was to count the number of seconds since the very beginning of the 70s. So, time “zero” stood for the birth of that great decade, and they called it epoch. Now this was all long before Ruby. In those ancient days (and programming in those ancient languages), you often had to worry about your numbers getting too large. In general, a number would either be from 0 to around 4 billion or be from -2 billion to +2 billion, depending on how they chose to store it. For whatever reasons (compatibility, tradition, cruelty...whatever), Ruby decided to go with these conventions. So (and this is the important point), you can’t have times more than 2 billion seconds away from epoch! This restriction isn’t too painful, though, because this span is from sometime in December 1901 to sometime in January 2038. In all fairness, Ruby does provide other classes, such as Date and DateTime, for handling just about any point in history. But these are such

Presumably this was done because the momentous fashion advances of the time rivaled the birth of Jesus in terms of cultural and spiritual significance...it’s Jesus Christ vs. Jesus Christ Superstar, and that, my friends, is a tough call.

a pain to use compared to Time that I don’t feel like figuring them out myself, much less teaching them to you. What’s the difference between civil time and commercial time? I have no idea. Julian calendar vs. Gregorian calendar? Italian vs. English reform dates? I’m sure there’s a Perfectly Good Reason for all that complexity. (In case you weren’t sitting across from me as I typed that, I was rolling my eyes.) But in the meantime, unless you are older than my great-grandma (101 next week!), you should be able to do these exercises.

www.it-ebooks.info
A F EW T HINGS TO T RY 115

12.2 A Few Things to Try
• One billion seconds! Find out the exact second you were born (if you can). Figure out when you will turn (or perhaps when you did turn) one billion seconds old. Then go mark your calendar. • Happy birthday! Ask what year a person was born in, then the month, and then the day. Figure out how old they are, and give them a big SPANK! for each birthday they have had.

12.3 The Hash Class
Another useful class is the Hash class. Hashes are a lot like arrays: they have a bunch of slots that can point to various objects. However, in an array, the slots are lined up in a row, and each one is numbered (starting from zero). In a hash, the slots aren’t in a row (they are just sort of jumbled together), and you can use any object to refer to a slot, not just a number. It’s good to use hashes when you have a bunch of things you want to keep track of but they don’t really fit into an ordered list. For example, we can make a dictionary for little C’s vocabulary: dict_array = [] dict_hash = {} # # array literal; same as Array.new hash literal; = 'candle' = 'glasses' = 'truck' = 'Alicia' same as Hash.new

dict_array[0] dict_array[1] dict_array[2] dict_array[3]

dict_hash[' shia-a'] = 'candle' dict_hash[' shaya' ] = 'glasses' dict_hash[' shasha'] = 'truck' dict_hash[' sh-sha'] = 'Alicia' dict_array.each do |word| puts word end dict_hash.each do |c_word, word| puts "#{c_word}: end #{word}"

www.it-ebooks.info
R ANGES 116

candle glasses truck Alicia shasha: sh-sha: shaya: shia-a: truck Alicia glasses candle

If I use an array, I have to remember that slot 0 is for “shia-a,” slot 1 is for “shaya,” and so on. But if I use a hash, it’s easy! Slot 'shia-a' holds the word for “shia-a,” of course. There’s nothing to remember. You might have noticed that when we used each, the objects in the hash didn’t come out in the same order we put them in. (I mean, they could, I suppose...it’s technically possible. They just don’t usually.) Arrays are for keeping things in order; hashes are for keeping things referenced by other things. Though people usually use strings to name the slots in a hash, you could use any kind of object, even arrays and other hashes. (I have no idea why you’d want to do this, though.) weird_hash = Hash.new weird_hash[12] = 'monkeys' weird_hash[[]] = 'emptiness' weird_hash[Time.new] = 'no time like the present'

Hashes and arrays are good for different things; it’s up to you to decide which one is best for a particular problem. I probably use hashes at least as often as arrays; they’re wonderful.

12.4 Ranges
Range is another great class. Ranges represent intervals of numbers. On the next page is just a quick glance at some of the methods ranges have.

Actually, you can have intervals of letters, strings, times...pretty much anything you can place in order—where you can say things like this < that and such. It’s not always clear, though, just what a range of strings is. In practice, I never use ranges over anything but integers.

www.it-ebooks.info
R ANGES 117

#

This is your range literal.

letters = 'a'..'c' # Convert range to array.

puts(['a','b','c'] == letters.to_a) # Iterate over a range: print letter end puts god_bless_the_70s = 1970..1979 puts god_bless_the_70s.min puts god_bless_the_70s.max puts(god_bless_the_70s.include?(1979 puts(god_bless_the_70s.include?(1980 )) ))

('A'..'Z').each do |letter|

puts(god_bless_the_70s.include?(1974.5))

true ABCDEFGHIJKLMNOPQRSTUVWXYZ 1970 1979 true false true

Do you really need ranges? No, not really. It’s the same with hashes and times, I suppose. You can program fairly well without them (and most languages don’t have anything like them, anyway). But it’s all about style, about intention, and about capturing snapshots of your brain right there in your code. And this is all just the tip of the iceberg. Each of these classes has way more methods than I have shown you, and this isn’t even a tenth of the classes that come with Ruby. But you don’t really need most of them...they are just time-savers. You can pick them up gradually as you go. That’s how most of us do it.

www.it-ebooks.info
S TRINGY S UPERPOWERS 118

12.5 Stringy Superpowers
I’d really feel like I was doing you a disservice if I didn’t show you at least a little more of what strings can do (in Ruby, at least). Plus, if I do, I can give you more interesting exercises. : ) Mind you, I’m still not going to show you even half, but I’ve just got to show you a little more. Remember back on page 64 when I said a lot of the string methods also work on arrays? Well, it goes both ways: some of the array methods you’ve learned also work on strings. Perhaps the most important and versatile is the [...] method. The first thing you can do with it is pass in a number and get the character at that position in the string. Well, you get the code for the character, anyway. Actually, it’s a bit strange at first: da_man = 'Mr. T' big_T = da_man[4] puts big_T puts ?T puts 84.chr

84 84 T

The character code for a capital T is 84. If all you want is the code for a specific character, you can precede it with a question mark, and if you have an integer and want its corresponding character, you can use the chr method. The question mark trick is particularly useful for comparisons: puts "Hello. My name is Julian."

puts "I'm extremely perceptive." puts "What's your name?" name = gets.chomp puts "Hi, #{name}."

www.it-ebooks.info
S TRINGY S UPERPOWERS if name[0] == ?C puts 'You have excellent taste in footwear.' puts 'I can just tell.' end

119

Hello.

My name is Julian.

I'm extremely perceptive. What's your name? Chris Hi, Chris. You have excellent taste in footwear. I can just tell.

This is a bit awkward, perhaps, but not too bad. This is just the beginning of our friend, the [...] method. Instead of picking out only one character (well, one character code), we can pick out substrings in two ways. One way is to pass in two numbers: the first tells us where to start the substring, and the second tells us how long of a substring we are looking for. The second way, though, is quite possibly too sexy for your car: just pass in a range. And both of these ways have a little twist. If you pass in a negative index, it counts from the end of the string. Dude! prof = 'We tore the universe a new space-hole, alright!' puts prof[12, 8] puts prof[12..20] puts def is_avi? filename filename.downcase[-4..-1] == '.avi' end # Vicarious embarrassment.

puts is_avi?(' DANCEMONKEYBOY.AVI' ) # Hey, I wasn't even 2 at the time...

puts is_avi?(' toilet_paper_fiasco.jpg' )

www.it-ebooks.info
A F EW M ORE T HINGS TO T RY 120

universe universe true false

12.6 A Few More Things to Try
• Party like it’s roman_to_integer 'mcmxcix'! Come on, you knew it was coming, didn’t you? It’s the other half of your roman_numeral 1999 method. Make sure to reject strings that aren’t valid Roman numerals. • Birthday helper! Write a program to read in names and birth dates from a text file. It should then ask you for a name. You type one in, and it tells you when that person’s next birthday will be (and, for the truly adventurous, how old they will be). The input file should look something like this:
Christopher Alexander, Christopher Lambert, Christopher Lee, Christopher Lloyd, Christopher Pine, Christopher Plummer, Christopher Walken, The King of Spain, Oct 4, 1936

Mar 29, 1957 May 27, 1922 Oct 22, 1938 Aug 3, 1976 Dec 13, 1927 Mar 31, 1943 Jan 5, 1938

(That would be me Christopher Pine, not the young James T. Kirk; I don’t care when he was born.) You’ll probably want to break each line up and put it in a hash, using the name as your key and the date as your value. In other words: words: birth_dates[' The King of Spain'] = 'Jan 5, 1938'

(You can store the date in some other format if you prefer.) Though you can do it without this tip, your program might look prettier if you use the each_line method for strings. It works pretty much like each does for arrays, but it returns each line of the

www.it-ebooks.info
C LASSES AND THE C LASS C LASS 121

multiline string one at a time (but with the line endings, so you might need to chomp them). Just thought I’d mention it....

12.7 Classes and the Class Class
I’ll warn you right now: this section is a bit of a brain bender, so if you’re not feeling particularly strong of stomach, you can skip to the next chapter. At least for now, it’s mainly of academic interest. But just in case you were wondering... As you may have noticed, we can call methods on strings (things such as length and chomp), but we can also call methods on the actual String class, methods such as new. This is because, in Ruby, classes are real objects. (This isn’t the case in most languages.) And since every object is in some class, classes must be, too. We can find the class of an object using the class method: puts(42.class) puts("I'll have mayonnaise on mine!".class) puts(Time.new.class) puts(Time.class) puts(String.class) # # # # # No shocker here. A little more interesting... Yeah, OK...

Hold your breath through the tunnel, boys and girls! <gasp!>

puts(Class.class)

Fixnum String Time Class Class Class

If this makes sense to you right now, then stop thinking about it! You might screw it up! Otherwise...don’t sweat it too much. Move on; let your subconscious do the work later.

www.it-ebooks.info

Chapter 13

Creating New Classes, Changing Existing Ones
Back on page 93, we wrote a method to give the English phrase for a given integer. It wasn’t an integer method, though; it was just a generic “program” method. Wouldn’t it be nice if you could write something like 22.to_eng instead of english_number 22? Here’s how: class Integer def to_eng if self == 5 english = 'five' else english = 'forty-two' end english end end # I'd better test on a couple of numbers...

puts 5.to_eng puts 42.to_eng

five forty-two

www.it-ebooks.info
A F EW T HINGS TO T RY 123

Well, I tested it; it seems to work. : ) We defined an integer method by jumping into the Integer class, defining the method there, and jumping back out. Now all integers have this (somewhat incomplete) method. In fact, you can do this with any method in any class, even the built-in methods. If you don’t like the reverse method for strings, you can just redefine it in much the same way, but I don’t recommend it! It’s best to leave the old methods alone and to make new ones when you want to do something new. Confused yet? Let me go over that last program some more. So far, whenever we executed any code or defined any methods, we did it in the default “program” object. In our last program, we left that object for the first time and hopped into the Integer class. We defined a method there (which makes it an integer method), and now all integers can use it. Inside that method we use self to refer to the object (the integer) using the method.

13.1 A Few Things to Try
• Extend the built-in classes. How about making your shuffle method on page 90 an array method? Or how about making factorial an integer method? 4.to_roman, anyone? In each case, remember to use self to access the object the method is being called on (the 4 in 4.to_roman).

13.2 Creating Classes
We’ve now seen a smattering of different classes. However, it’s easy to come up with kinds of objects that Ruby doesn’t have—objects you’d like it to have. Fear not; creating a new class is as easy as extending an old one. Let’s say we wanted to make some dice in Ruby, for example. Here’s how we could make the Die class: class Die def roll 1 + rand(6) end end

www.it-ebooks.info
I NSTANCE VARIABLES
# Let's make a couple of dice...

124

dice = [Die.new, Die.new] # ...and roll them. puts die.roll end

dice.each do |die|

1 3

(If you skipped the section on random numbers, rand(6) just gives a random number between 0 and 5.) And that’s it! These are objects of our very own. Roll the dice a few times (run the program again), and watch what turns up. We can define all sorts of methods for our objects...but there’s something missing. Working with these objects feels a lot like programming before we learned about variables. Look at our dice, for example. We can roll them, and each time we do they give us a different number. But if we wanted to hang onto that number, we would have to create a variable to point to the number. It seems like any decent die should be able to have a number and that rolling the die should change that number. If we keep track of the die, we shouldn’t also have to keep track of the number it is showing. However, if we try to store the number we rolled in a (local) variable in roll, it will be gone as soon as roll is finished. We need to store the number in a different kind of variable, an instance variable.

13.3 Instance Variables
Normally when we want to talk about a string, we will just call it a string. However, we could also call it a string object. Sometimes programmers might call it an instance of the class String, but it’s just another way of saying string. An instance of a class is just an object of that class. So, instance variables are just an object’s variables. A method’s local variables last until the method is finished. An object’s instance variables, on the other hand, will last as long as the object does. To tell

www.it-ebooks.info
I NSTANCE VARIABLES 125

instance variables from local variables, they have @ in front of their names: class Die def roll @number_showing = 1 + rand(6) end def showing @number_showing end end die = Die.new die.roll puts die.showing puts die.showing die.roll puts die.showing puts die.showing

2 2 3 3

Very nice! roll rolls the die, and showing tells us which number is showing. However, what if we try to look at what’s showing before we’ve rolled the die (before we’ve set @number_showing)? class Die def roll @number_showing = 1 + rand(6) end def showing @number_showing end end

www.it-ebooks.info
I NSTANCE VARIABLES
# # Since I'm not going to use this die again, I don't need to save it in a variable.

126

puts Die.new.showing

nil

Hmmm...well, at least it didn’t give us an error. Still, it doesn’t really make sense for a die to be “unrolled,” or whatever nil is supposed to mean here. It would be nice if we could set up our new Die object right when it’s created. That’s what initialize is for; as soon as an object is created, initialize is automatically called on it: class Die def initialize # # end def roll @number_showing = 1 + rand(6) end def showing @number_showing end end puts Die.new.showing I'll just roll the die, though we could do something else if we wanted to, such as setting the die to have 6 showing.

roll

4

(One thing to note here: in the previous code, we are first just defining what the Die class is by defining the methods initialize, roll, and showing. However, none of these is actually called until the very last line.) Very nice. Our dice are just about perfect. The only feature that might be missing is a way to set which side of a die is showing...why don’t

www.it-ebooks.info
NEW VS . INITIALIZE

127

you write a cheat method that does just that? Come back when you’re done (and when you tested that it worked, of course). Make sure that someone can’t set the die to have a 7 showing; you’re cheating, not bending the laws of logic.

13.4 new vs. initialize
That’s some pretty cool stuff we just covered. But the relationship between new and initialize is a bit subtle. And “subtle” may as well mean “confusing.” Just what is the deal? The methods new and initialize work hand in hand. You use new to create a new object, and initialize is then called automatically (if you defined it in your class). They pretty much happen at the same time. How do you keep keep them straight? First, new is a method of the class, while initialize is a method of the instance. You use new to create the instance, and then initialize is automatically called on that instance. This means that the call to new must come first! Until you call new, there’s no instance to call initialize upon. Second, you define initialize in your class, but you never define new. (It’s already built in to all classes.) Conversely, you call new to create an object, but you never call initialize. The method new takes care of that for you. (Strictly speaking, it is possible to call initialize, just as it is possible to define new. But doing so is either very advanced or very stupid. Or both. Let’s not even go there.) The reason for having these two methods is that you really need one of them to be a class method and the other to be an instance method. If you think about it, new has to be a class method, because when you want to create an object, the object you want does not exist yet! You can’t say, for example, the following: die.new because die doesn’t exist yet. And initialize really has to be an instance method, because you are initializing that object. This means that you need access to the instance variables and such. You can’t do that from a class method, because it

www.it-ebooks.info
B ABY D RAGON 128

wouldn’t know which instance to get the instance variables from. (You certainly don’t want to initialize every single instance of Die every time you create a new one.) So just remember, you define the instance method initialize, and you call the class method new (and not the other way around).

13.5 Baby Dragon
Great! You know how to create your own classes, even some of the subtle bits, but so far you’ve really only seen a small, fluffy, toy example. Let me give you something a bit more chewy. Let’s say we want to make a simple virtual pet, a baby dragon. Like most babies, it should be able to eat, sleep, and poop, which means we will need to be able to feed it, put it to bed, and take it on walks. Internally, our dragon will need to keep track of whether it is hungry, tired, or needs to go, but we won’t be able to see that when we interact with our dragon, just like you can’t ask a human baby, “Are you hungry?” We’ll also add a few other fun ways we can interact with our baby dragon, and when he is born, we’ll give him a name. (Whatever you pass into the new method is then passed onto the initialize method for you.) OK, let’s give it a shot: class Dragon def initialize name @name = name @asleep = false @stuff_in_belly = 10 0 # # He's full. He doesn't need to go. @stuff_in_intestine =

puts "#{@name} is born." end def feed puts "You feed #{@name}." @stuff_in_belly = 10 passage_of_time end def walk puts "You walk #{@name}." @stuff_in_intestine = 0

www.it-ebooks.info
B ABY D RAGON passage_of_time end def put_to_bed puts "You put #{@name} to bed." @asleep = true 3.times do if @asleep passage_of_time end if @asleep puts "#{@name} snores, filling the room with smoke." end end if @asleep @asleep = false puts "#{@name} wakes up slowly." end end def toss puts "You toss #{@name} up into the air." puts 'He giggles, which singes your eyebrows.' passage_of_time end def rock puts "You rock #{@name} gently." @asleep = true puts 'He briefly dozes off...' passage_of_time if @asleep @asleep = false puts '...but wakes when you stop.' end end private # # # "private" means that the methods defined here are methods internal to the object. (You can feed your dragon, but you can't ask him whether he's hungry.)

129

www.it-ebooks.info
B ABY D RAGON def hungry? # # # end def poopy? @stuff_in_intestine >= 8 end def passage_of_time if @stuff_in_belly > 0 # Move food from belly to intestine. = @stuff_in_belly - 1 @stuff_in_belly else # Method names can end with "?". Usually, we do this only if the method returns true or false, like this:

130

@stuff_in_belly <= 2

@stuff_in_intestine = @stuff_in_intestine + 1 Our dragon is starving! if @asleep @asleep = false puts 'He wakes up suddenly!' end puts "#{@name} is starving! exit end if @stuff_in_intestine >= 10 @stuff_in_intestine = 0 puts "Whoops! end if hungry? if @asleep @asleep = false puts 'He wakes up suddenly!' end puts "#{@name}' s stomach grumbles..." end if poopy? if @asleep @asleep = false #{@name} had an accident..." # In desperation, he ate YOU!" This quits the program.

www.it-ebooks.info
B ABY D RAGON puts 'He wakes up suddenly!' end puts "#{@name} does the potty dance..." end end end pet = Dragon.new 'Norbert' pet.feed pet.toss pet.walk pet.put_to_bed pet.rock pet.put_to_bed pet.put_to_bed pet.put_to_bed pet.put_to_bed

131

Norbert is born. You feed Norbert. You toss Norbert up into the air. He giggles, which singes your eyebrows. You walk Norbert. You put Norbert to bed. Norbert snores, filling the room with smoke. Norbert snores, filling the room with smoke. Norbert snores, filling the room with smoke. Norbert wakes up slowly. You rock Norbert gently. He briefly dozes off... ...but wakes when you stop. You put Norbert to bed. He wakes up suddenly! Norbert' s stomach grumbles... You put Norbert to bed. He wakes up suddenly! Norbert' s stomach grumbles... You put Norbert to bed. He wakes up suddenly!

www.it-ebooks.info
B ABY D RAGON 132

Norbert' s stomach grumbles... Norbert does the potty dance... You put Norbert to bed. He wakes up suddenly! Norbert is starving! In desperation, he ate YOU!

Whew! Of course, it would be nicer if this were an interactive program...oh, I think I smell an exercise coming on. We saw a few new things in that example. The first is the word private that we stuck right in the middle of our class definition. I could have left it out, but I wanted to enforce the idea that certain methods are things you can do to a dragon and other methods are used only within the dragon. You can think of these as being “under the hood”: unless you are an automobile mechanic, all you really need to know is the gas pedal, the brake pedal, and the steering wheel. A programmer might call those the public interface of your car. How your airbag knows when to deploy, however, is internal to the car; the typical user (driver) doesn’t need to know how that works. Actually, for a bit more concrete example along those lines, let’s talk about how you might represent a car in a video game. First, you would want to decide what you want your public interface to look like; in other words, which methods should people be able to call on one of your car objects? Well, they need to be able to push the gas pedal and the brake pedal, but they would also need to be able to specify how hard they are pushing the pedal. (There’s a big difference between flooring it and tapping it.) They would also need to be able to steer, and again, they would need to be able to say how hard they are turning the wheel. I suppose you could go further and add a clutch, turn signals, rocket launcher, afterburner, flux capacitor, and so on.... It depends on what type of game you are making. Internal to a car object, though, much more would need to be going on; other things a car would need are a speed, a direction, and a position (at the most basic). These attributes would be modified by pressing on the gas or brake pedals and turning the wheel, of course, but the user would not be able to set the position directly (which would be like warping). You might also want to keep track of skidding or damage, whether you have caught any air, and so on. These would all be internal to your car object (that is, not directly accessible by the player; these would be private).

www.it-ebooks.info
A F EW M ORE T HINGS TO T RY 133

13.6 A Few More Things to Try
• Orange tree. Make an OrangeTree class that has a height method that returns its height and a one_year_passes method that, when called, ages the tree one year. Each year the tree grows taller (however much you think an orange tree should grow in a year), and after some number of years (again, your call) the tree should die. For the first few years, it should not produce fruit, but after a while it should, and I guess that older trees produce more each year than younger trees...whatever you think makes the most sense. And, of course, you should be able to count_the_oranges (which returns the number of oranges on the tree) and pick_an_orange (which reduces the @orange_count by 1 and returns a string telling you how delicious the orange was, or else it just tells you that there are no more oranges to pick this year). Make sure any oranges you don’t pick one year fall off before the next year. • Interactive baby dragon. Write a program that lets you enter commands such as feed and walk and calls those methods on your dragon. Of course, since you are inputting just strings, you will need some sort of method dispatch, where your program checks which string was entered and then calls the appropriate method.

www.it-ebooks.info

Chapter 14

Blocks and Procs
This is definitely one of the coolest features of Ruby. Some other languages have this feature, though they may call it something else (like closures), but most of the more popular ones don’t, and it’s a shame. And, in any case, Ruby makes it so pretty with its cute little syntax! What is this cool new thing? It’s the ability to take a block of code (code in between do and end), wrap it up in an object (called a proc), store it in a variable or pass it to a method, and run the code in the block whenever you feel like it (more than once, if you want). So, it’s kind of like a method itself, except it isn’t bound to an object (it is an object), and you can store it or pass it around like you can with any object. I think it’s example time: toast = Proc.new do puts 'Cheers!' end toast.call toast.call toast.call

Cheers! Cheers! Cheers!

I created a proc (which I think is supposed to be short for procedure, but far more important, it rhymes with block) that held the block of code, and then I called the proc three times. As you can see, it’s a lot like a method.

www.it-ebooks.info
M ETHODS T HAT T AKE P ROCS 135

Actually, it’s even more like a method than I have shown you, because blocks can take parameters: do_you_like = Proc.new do |good_stuff| puts "I *really* like #{good_stuff}!" end do_you_like.call 'chocolate' do_you_like.call 'Ruby'

I *really* like chocolate! I *really* like Ruby!

OK, so we see what blocks and procs are, and how to use them, but what’s the point? Why not just use methods? Well, it’s because there are some things you just can’t do with methods. In particular, you can’t pass methods into other methods (but you can pass procs into methods), and methods can’t return other methods (but they can return procs). This is simply because procs are objects; methods aren’t. (By the way, is any of this looking familiar? Yep, you’ve seen blocks before...when you learned about iterators. But let’s talk more about that in a bit.)

14.1 Methods That Take Procs
When we pass a proc into a method, we can control how, if, or how many times we call the proc. For example, let’s say we want to do something before and after some code is run: def do_self_importantly some_proc puts "Everybody just HOLD ON! some_proc.call puts "OK everyone, I'm done. end say_hello = Proc.new do puts 'hello' end As you were." I'm doing something..."

www.it-ebooks.info
M ETHODS T HAT T AKE P ROCS say_goodbye = Proc.new do puts 'goodbye' end do_self_importantly say_hello do_self_importantly say_goodbye

136

Everybody just HOLD ON! hello OK everyone, I'm done. Everybody just HOLD ON! goodbye OK everyone, I'm done.

I'm doing something... As you were. I'm doing something... As you were.

Maybe that doesn’t appear particularly fabulous...but it is. It’s all too common in programming to have strict requirements about what must be done when. Remember opening and closing a file? If you want to save or load a file, you have to open the file, write or read the relevant data, and then close the file. If you forget to close the file, Bad Things can happen. But each time you want to save or load a file, you have to do the same thing: open the file, do what you really want to do, and then close the file. It’s tedious and easy to forget. But with this trick, it’s not even an issue. You can also write methods that will determine how many times (or even whether) to call a proc. Here’s a method that will call the proc passed in about half of the time and another that will call it twice: def maybe_do some_proc if rand(2) == 0 some_proc.call end end def twice_do some_proc some_proc.call some_proc.call end

www.it-ebooks.info
M ETHODS T HAT T AKE P ROCS wink = Proc.new do puts '<wink>' end glance = Proc.new do puts '<glance>' end maybe_do wink maybe_do wink maybe_do glance maybe_do glance twice_do wink twice_do glance

137

<wink> <wink> <wink> <wink> <glance> <glance>

These are some of the more common uses of procs that enable us to do things we simply could not have done using methods alone. Sure, you could write a method to wink twice, and you could do it with your left pinky! But you couldn’t write one to just do something twice. Before we move on, let’s look at one last example. So far the procs we have passed in have been fairly similar to each other. This time they will be quite different, so you can see how much such a method depends on the procs passed into it. Our method will take some object and a proc and will call the proc on that object. If the proc returns false, we quit; otherwise, we call the proc with the returned object. We keep doing this until the proc returns false (which it had better do eventually, or the program will crash). The method will return the last non-false value returned by the proc. def do_until_false first_input, some_proc input = first_input output = first_input

www.it-ebooks.info
M ETHODS T HAT T AKE P ROCS while output input end input end build_array_of_squares = Proc.new do |array| last_number = array.last if last_number <= 0 false else # # Take off the last number... ...and replace it with its square... array.pop array.push last_number*last_number # ...followed by the next smaller number. array.push last_number-1 end end always_false = Proc.new do |just_ignore_me| false end puts do_until_false([5], build_array_of_squares).inspect yum = 'lemonade with a hint of orange blossom water' puts do_until_false(yum, always_false) = output output = some_proc.call input

138

[25, 16, 9, 4, 1, 0] lemonade with a hint of orange blossom water

OK, so that was a pretty weird example, I’ll admit. But it shows how differently our method acts when given very different procs. (Do yourself a favor, and try that lemonade. Unbelievable.) The inspect method is a lot like to_s, except the string it returns tries to show you the Ruby code for building the object you passed it. Here it shows us the whole array returned by our first call to do_until_false.

www.it-ebooks.info
M ETHODS T HAT R ETURN P ROCS 139

Also, you might notice that we never actually squared that 0 on the end of that array, but since 0 squared is still just 0, we didn’t have to do this. And since always_false was, you know, always false, do_until_false didn’t do anything at all the second time we called it; it just returned what was passed in.

14.2 Methods That Return Procs
One of the cool things you can do with procs is create them in methods and return them. This allows all sorts of crazy programming power (things with impressive names, such as lazy evaluation, infinite data structures, and currying). I don’t actually do these things very often, but they are just about the sexiest programming techniques around. In this example, compose takes two procs and returns a new proc that, when called, calls the first proc and passes its result into the second: def compose proc1, proc2 Proc.new do |x| proc2.call(proc1.call(x)) end end square_it = Proc.new do |x| x * x end double_it = Proc.new do |x| x + x end double_then_square = compose double_it, square_it square_then_double = compose square_it, double_it puts double_then_square.call(5) puts square_then_double.call(5)

100 50

(Notice that the call to proc1 had to be inside the parentheses for proc2 in order for it to run first.)

www.it-ebooks.info
P ASSING B LOCKS (N OT P ROCS ) INTO M ETHODS 140

14.3 Passing Blocks (Not Procs) into Methods
OK, so this has been more theoretically cool than actually cool, partly because this is all a bit of a hassle to use. I’m man enough to admit that. A lot of the problem is that we have to go through three steps (defining the method, making the proc, and calling the method with the proc) when it sort of feels like there should be only two (defining the method and passing the block of code right into the method, without using a proc at all), since most of the time you don’t want to use the proc/block after you pass it into the method. It should be...more like how iterators work! Sho’ nuff, baby: class Array def each_even(&was_a_block__now_a_proc) # # We start with "true" because arrays start with 0, which is even.

is_even = true self.each do |object| if is_even was_a_block__now_a_proc.call object end # end end end fruits = ['apple', 'bad apple', 'cherry', 'durian' ] fruits.each_even do |fruit| puts "Yum! end # # # Remember, we are getting the even-numbered *elements* of the array, which in this case are all odd numbers, because I live only to irritate you. puts "#{odd_ball} is NOT an even number!" end I just love #{fruit} pies, don't you?" Toggle from even to odd, or odd to even.

is_even = !is_even

[1, 2, 3, 4, 5].each_even do |odd_ball|

www.it-ebooks.info
P ASSING B LOCKS (N OT P ROCS ) INTO M ETHODS 141

Yum! Yum!

I just love apple pies, don't you? I just love cherry pies, don't you?

1 is NOT an even number! 3 is NOT an even number! 5 is NOT an even number!

To pass in a block to each_even, all we had to do was stick the block after the method. You can pass a block into any method this way, though many methods will just ignore the block. In order to make your method not ignore the block but grab it and turn it into a proc, put the name of the proc at the end of your method’s parameter list, preceded by an ampersand (&). So, that part is a little tricky but not too bad, and you have to do that only once (when you define the method). Then you can use the method over and over again, just like the built-in methods that take blocks, such as each and times. (Remember 5.times do...? What a cutie....) If you get confused (I mean, there’s this each and its block inside each_even), just remember what each_even is supposed to do: call the block passed in with every other element in the array. Once you’ve written it and it works, you don’t need to think about what it’s actually doing under the hood (“which block is called when?”); in fact, that’s exactly why we write methods like this—so we never have to think about how they work again. We just use them. I remember one time I wanted to profile some code I was writing; you know, I wanted to time how long it took to run. I wrote a method that takes the time before running the code block, then runs it, then takes the time again at the end, and finally figures out the difference. And it went a little something like this: def profile block_description, &block start_time = Time.new block.call duration = Time.new - start_time puts "#{block_description}: end profile '25000 doublings' do number = 1 #{duration} seconds"

www.it-ebooks.info
A F EW T HINGS TO T RY
25000.times do number = number + number end puts "#{number.to_s.length} digits" # end profile 'count to a million' do number = 0 1000000.times do number = number + 1 end end That's the number of digits in this HUGE number.

142

7526 digits 25000 doublings: 0.124976 seconds 0.19972 seconds count to a million:

How simple! How elegant! Dude, admit it: you think I’m cool. With that tiny method, we can now easily time any section of any program; we just throw the code in a block, send it to profile, and do a little dance.... What could be simpler? Though we didn’t do it, you could find the slow parts of your code and add more profiling calls nested inside your original calls! Beautiful! In most languages, I would have to explicitly add that timing code (the stuff in profile) around every section I wanted to time. What a hassle. In Ruby, however, I get to keep it all in one place and (more important) out of my way!

14.4 A Few Things to Try
• Even better profiling. After you do your profiling, see the slow parts of your program, and either make them faster or learn to love them as they are, you probably don’t want to see all of that profiling anymore. But (I hope) you’re too lazy to go back and delete it all...especially because you might want to use it again someday. Modify the profile method so you can turn all profiling on and off by changing just one line of code. Just one word!

www.it-ebooks.info
A F EW T HINGS TO T RY 143

• Grandfather clock. Write a method that takes a block and calls it once for each hour that has passed today. That way, if I were to pass in the block: do puts 'DONG!' end

it would chime (sort of) like a grandfather clock. Test your method out with a few different blocks. Hint: You can use Time.new.hour to get the current hour. However, this returns a number between 0 and 23, so you will have to alter those numbers in order to get ordinary clock-face numbers (1 to 12). • Program logger. Write a method called log that takes a string description of a block (and, of course, a block). Similar to the method do_self_importantly, it should puts a string telling you it started the block and another string at the end telling you it finished and also telling you what the block returned. Test your method by sending it a code block. Inside the block, put another call to log, passing a block to it. In other words, your output should look something like this:
Beginning "outer block"... Beginning "some little block"... ..."some little block" finished, returning: 5 Beginning "yet another block"... ..."yet another block" finished, returning: I like Thai food! ..."outer block" finished, returning: false

• Better program logger. The output from that last logger was kind of hard to read, and it would just get worse the more you used it. It would be so much easier to read if it indented the lines in the inner blocks. So, you’ll need to keep track of how deeply nested you are every time the logger wants to write something. To do this, use a global variable, which is a variable you can see from anywhere in your code. To make a global variable, just precede

www.it-ebooks.info
A F EW T HINGS TO T RY 144

your variable name with $, like so: $global, $nesting_depth, and $big_top_pee_wee. In the end, your logger should output code like this:
Beginning "outer block"... Beginning "some little block"... Beginning "teeny-tiny block"... ..."teeny-tiny block" finished, returning: lots of love ..."some little block" finished, returning: 42 Beginning "yet another block"... ..."yet another block" finished, returning: I love Indian food! ..."outer block" finished, returning: true

www.it-ebooks.info

Chapter 15

Beyond This Fine Book
Well, that’s about all you’re going to learn from this book. Congratulations, programmer! You’ve learned a lot! Maybe you don’t feel like you remember everything, or you skipped over some parts...really, that’s just fine. Programming isn’t about what you know; it’s about what you can figure out. As long as you know where to find out the things you forgot, you’re doing just fine. (I was looking stuff up constantly as I was writing this.) Where do you look stuff up (besides here)? If there’s something strange and it don’t look good...who you gonna call? I look for help with Ruby in three main places. If it’s a small question, and I think I can experiment on my own to find the answer, I use irb. If it’s a bigger question, I look it up in my PickAxe. And if I just can’t figure it out on my own, then I ask for help on ruby-talk.

15.1 irb: Interactive Ruby
If you installed Ruby, then you installed irb. To use it, just go to your command prompt, and type irb. When you’re in irb, you can type in any Ruby expression you want, and it will tell you the value of it. Type in 1+2, and it will tell you 3 (note that you don’t have to use puts). It’s kind of like a giant Ruby calculator. When you are done, type exit. There’s a lot more to irb than this, but you can learn all about it in the PickAxe.

www.it-ebooks.info
T HE P ICK A XE : Programming Ruby 146

15.2 The PickAxe: Programming Ruby
Absolutely the Ruby book to get is Programming Ruby, The Pragmatic Programmers’ Guide by Dave Thomas and others (from the Pragmatic Bookshelf).1 Although I highly recommend picking up the second edition of this excellent book, which covers all of Ruby 1.8 (that is, the Ruby in this book), you can also get a slightly older (but still mostly relevant) version for free online. (Actually, if you installed the Windows version of Ruby, you already have it.) At the time of this writing, Ruby 1.8 is the stable, production version of the language; Ruby 1.9 is the cutting-edge version. If you are using Ruby 1.9, then you’ll want the latest version: Programming Ruby 1.9, The Pragmatic Programmers’ Guide.2 You can find just about everything about Ruby, from the basic to the advanced, in this book. It’s easy to read, it’s comprehensive, and it’s just about perfect. I wish every language had a book of this quality. At the back of the book, you’ll find a huge section detailing every method in every class, explaining it and giving examples. (This is where you really want the second edition.) I just love this book! You can get it from a number of places (including the Pragmatic Programmers’ own site). My favorite place for the free first edition is http:// ruby-doc.org/. That version has a nice table of contents on the side, as well as an index. (ruby-doc.org has lots of other great documentation as well, such as for the Core API and Standard Library...basically, it documents everything Ruby comes with right out of the box. Check it out.) And why is it called the PickAxe? Well, there’s a picture of a pickaxe on the cover of the book. It’s a silly name, I guess, but it stuck.

15.3 Ruby-Talk: The Ruby Mailing List
Even with irb and the PickAxe, sometimes you still can’t figure it out. Or perhaps you want to know whether someone already created whatever it is you are working on and want to see whether you could use it instead of writing your own. In these cases, the place to go is ruby-talk, the Ruby mailing list. It’s full of friendly, smart, helpful people. People
1 http://www.pragprog.com/titles/ruby/programming-ruby 2 http://www.pragprog.com/titles/ruby3/programming-ruby-1-9

www.it-ebooks.info
T IM T OADY 147

like...you know, me. To learn more about it, or to subscribe, have a look at http://www.ruby-lang.org/en/community/mailing-lists/. WARNING: There’s a lot of mail on the mailing list every day. I have mine automatically sent to a specific mail folder so it doesn’t get in my way. If you don’t want to deal with all that mail, though, you don’t have to; the ruby-talk mailing list is mirrored to the newsgroup comp.lang.ruby, and vice versa, so you can see the same messages there.

15.4 Tim Toady
Something I have tried to shield you from, but that you will surely run into soon, is the concept of TMTOWTDI (pronounced Tim Toady, I think): There’s More Than One Way To Do It. Now some will tell you what a wonderful thing TMTOWTDI is, while others feel quite differently. I think it’s pretty cool, because having more than one way to do something feels more expressive. Nonetheless, I think it’s a terrible way to teach someone how to program. (Learning one way to do something is challenging and confusing enough.) However, now that you are moving beyond this book, you’ll be seeing much more diverse code. For example, I can think of at least five other ways to make a string (aside from surrounding some text in single quotes), and each one works slightly differently. I showed you only the simplest of the six. And when we talked about branching, I showed you if, but I didn’t show you unless. I’ll let you figure that one out in irb. Another nice little shortcut you can use with if, unless, and while is the cute one-line version:
# # These words are from a program I wrote to generate English-like babble. Cool, huh?

puts 'combergearl thememberate' if 5 == 2**2 + 1**1 puts 'supposine follutify' unless 'Chris'.length == 5

combergearl thememberate

And finally, there is another way of writing methods that take blocks (not procs). We saw the thing where we grabbed the block and turned it into a proc using the &block trick in our parameter list when we define

www.it-ebooks.info
T IM T OADY 148

the method. Then, to call the block, we just use block.call. Well, there’s a shorter way (though I personally find it more confusing). Instead of this... def do_it_twice(&block) block.call block.call end do_it_twice do puts 'murditivent flavitemphan siresent litics' end

murditivent flavitemphan siresent litics murditivent flavitemphan siresent litics

you do this... def do_it_twice yield yield end do_it_twice do puts 'buritiate mustripe lablic acticise' end

buritiate mustripe lablic acticise buritiate mustripe lablic acticise

I don’t know...what do you think? Maybe it’s just me, but yield?! If it was something like call_the_hidden_block, that would make a lot more sense to me. A lot of people say yield makes sense to them. But I guess that’s what TMTOWTDI is all about: they do it their way, and I’ll do it my way.

www.it-ebooks.info
THE END 149

15.5 THE END
You go, you big, bad programmer, you. And if you liked the book or didn’t (but especially if you did), drop me a line: chris@pine.fm Use it for good and not for evil. : )

www.it-ebooks.info

Appendix A

Possible Solutions
Since the first edition of this book, the single question I have been asked the most is “Where are the answers to the exercises?” My reluctance centered around the first occurrence of the word the in that question. The answers? There’s more than one right answer, of course. Many, many more. These aren’t math problems. Even the first exercises, which are sort of like math problems, have many possible solutions. If, instead of writing a program about orange trees or the minutes in a decade, you were asked to write a poem about them, it would be silly (if not downright harmful) to include “the answers.” That was my reasoning, anyway. Kind of stupid, in retrospect—while these aren’t math problems, neither are they poems. Still, I’m really attached to the idea that there’s no one right answer here, so I did a few things to drive that point home. First, notice the title to this appendix: possible solutions, not the solutions. Then I went through and did each exercise twice. Yes, seriously. The first time is to show just one possible way that you could have done it, given what you have learned up to that point in the book. The second time is to show you how I would do it, using whatever techniques tickled my fancy. Some of these techniques are not covered in this book, so it’s OK if you don’t understand exactly what’s going on. These programs tend to be more complex but also shorter (sometimes much shorter) and sometimes more correct or robust. Often cuter. (I like cute code.) Ignore them or study them as you prefer.
No more complaining about how hard the exercises were, OK? At least you had to do them only once.

www.it-ebooks.info
E XERCISES FROM C HAPTER 2 151

A.1 Exercises from Chapter 2
Hours in a Year
How you could do it: puts 24*365
(from on page 12)

8760

How I would do it:
# depends on if it's a leap year

puts 24*365 puts "(or #{24*366} on occasion)"

8760 (or 8784 on occasion)

Minutes in a Decade
How you could do it: puts 60*24*(365*10 + 2)

(from on page 12)

5258880

How I would do it:
# depends on how many leap years in that decade

puts "#{60*24*(365*10 + 2)} or #{60*24*(365*10 + 3)}"

5258880 or 5260320

Your Age in Seconds
How you could do it:

(from on page 13)

www.it-ebooks.info
E XERCISES FROM C HAPTER 5 152

puts 60*60*24*(365*32 + 9)

1009929600

How I would do it: puts(Time.new - Time.gm(1976, 8, 3, 13, 31))

1040353874.92412

Our Dear Author’s Age
How you could do it: puts 1025000000/(60*60*24*365)

(from on page 13)

32

And that’s pretty much how I would do it, too. : )

A.2 Exercises from Chapter 5
Full Name Greeting
How you could do it: puts 'What is your first name?' f_name = gets.chomp puts 'What is your middle name?' m_name = gets.chomp puts 'What is your last name?' l_name = gets.chomp full_name = f_name + ' ' + m_name + ' ' + l_name puts 'Hello, ' + full_name + '!'
(from on page 28)

www.it-ebooks.info
E XERCISES FROM C HAPTER 5 153

What is your first name? Sam What is your middle name? I What is your last name? Am Hello, Sam I Am!

How I would do it: puts "What's your first name?" f_name = gets.chomp puts "What's your middle name?" m_name = gets.chomp puts "What's your last name?" l_name = gets.chomp puts "Chris Pine is cooler than you, #{f_name} #{m_name} #{l_name}."

What's your first name? Marvin What's your middle name? K. What's your last name? Mooney Chris Pine is cooler than you, Marvin K. Mooney.

Bigger, Better Favorite Number
How you could do it: puts 'Hey! What\'s your favorite number?'

(from on page 28)

fav_num = gets.chomp.to_i better_num = fav_num + 1 puts 'That\'s ok, I guess, but isn\'t '+better_num.to_s+' just a bit better?'

Hey! 5

What's your favorite number?

That's ok, I guess, but isn't 6 just a bit better?

www.it-ebooks.info
E XERCISES FROM C HAPTER 6 154

How I would do it: puts "Hey! What's your favorite number?"

fav_num = gets.chomp.to_i puts "That's ok, I guess, but isn't #{fav_num + 1} just a bit better?"

Hey! 5

What's your favorite number?

That's ok, I guess, but isn't 6 just a bit better?

A.3 Exercises from Chapter 6
Angry Boss
How you could do it: puts 'CAN\'T YOU SEE I\'M BUSY?! request = gets.chomp puts 'WHADDAYA MEAN "' + request.upcase + '"?!? YOU\'RE FIRED!!' MAKE IT FAST, JOHNSON!'
(from on page 36)

CAN'T YOU SEE I'M BUSY?! I want a raise

MAKE IT FAST, JOHNSON!

WHADDAYA MEAN "I WANT A RAISE"?!? YOU'RE FIRED!!

How I would do it: names = ['johnson' , 'smith', 'weinberg' , 'filmore' ] puts "CAN'T YOU SEE I'M BUSY?! request = gets.chomp puts "WHADDAYA MEAN \"#{request.upcase}\"?!? YOU'RE FIRED!!" MAKE IT FAST, #{names[rand(4)].upcase}!"

CAN'T YOU SEE I'M BUSY?! I quit

MAKE IT FAST, WEINBERG!

WHADDAYA MEAN "I QUIT"?!? YOU'RE FIRED!!

www.it-ebooks.info
E XERCISES FROM C HAPTER 7 155

Table of Contents
How you could do it: title = 'Table of Contents' .center(50) Getting Started' .ljust(30) + 'page Numbers' .ljust(30) Letters' .ljust(30) + 'page

(from on page 36)

chap_1 = 'Chapter 1: chap_2 = 'Chapter 2: chap_3 = 'Chapter 3: puts title puts puts chap_1 puts chap_2 puts chap_3

1'.rjust(20) 9'.rjust(20)

+ 'page 13'.rjust(20)

Table of Contents Chapter 1: Chapter 2: Chapter 3: Getting Started Numbers Letters page page 1 9

page 13

And how would I do it? Well, that was a different exercise (at the end of Chapter 8).

A.4 Exercises from Chapter 7
“99 Bottles of Beer on the Wall”
How you could do it: num_at_start = 5 # change to 99 if you want
(from on page 57)

num_now = num_at_start while num_now > 2 puts num_now.to_s + ' bottles of beer on the wall, ' + num_now.to_s + ' bottles of beer!' num_now = num_now - 1 puts 'Take one down, pass it around, ' + num_now.to_s + ' bottles of beer on the wall!' end

www.it-ebooks.info
E XERCISES FROM C HAPTER 7 puts "2 bottles of beer on the wall, 2 bottles of beer!" puts "Take one down, pass it around, 1 bottle of beer on the wall!" puts "1 bottle of beer on the wall, 1 bottle of beer!" puts "Take one down, pass it around, no more bottles of beer on the wall!"

156

5 bottles of beer on the wall, 5 bottles of beer! Take one down, pass it around, 4 bottles of beer on the wall! 4 bottles of beer on the wall, 4 bottles of beer! Take one down, pass it around, 3 bottles of beer on the wall! 3 bottles of beer on the wall, 3 bottles of beer! Take one down, pass it around, 2 bottles of beer on the wall! 2 bottles of beer on the wall, 2 bottles of beer! Take one down, pass it around, 1 bottle of beer on the wall! 1 bottle of beer on the wall, 1 bottle of beer! Take one down, pass it around, no more bottles of beer on the wall!

How I would do it: num_at_start = 5 # change to 99 if you want

num_bot = proc { |n| "#{n} bottle#{n == 1 ? '' : 's'}" } num_at_start.downto(2) do |num| puts "#{num_bot[num]} of beer on the wall, #{num_bot[num]} of beer!" puts "Take one down, pass it around, #{num_bot[num-1]} of beer on the wall!" end puts "#{num_bot[1]} of beer on the wall, #{num_bot[1]} of beer!" puts "Take one down, pass it around, no more bottles of beer on the wall!"

5 bottles of beer on the wall, 5 bottles of beer! Take one down, pass it around, 4 bottles of beer on the wall! 4 bottles of beer on the wall, 4 bottles of beer! Take one down, pass it around, 3 bottles of beer on the wall! 3 bottles of beer on the wall, 3 bottles of beer! Take one down, pass it around, 2 bottles of beer on the wall! 2 bottles of beer on the wall, 2 bottles of beer! Take one down, pass it around, 1 bottle of beer on the wall! 1 bottle of beer on the wall, 1 bottle of beer! Take one down, pass it around, no more bottles of beer on the wall!

www.it-ebooks.info
E XERCISES FROM C HAPTER 7 157

Deaf Grandma
How you could do it: puts 'HEY THERE, SONNY! while true said = gets.chomp if said == "BYE" puts 'BYE SWEETIE!' break end if said != said.upcase puts 'HUH?! else random_year = 1930 + rand(21) puts 'NO, NOT SINCE ' + random_year.to_s + '!' end end SPEAK UP, SONNY!' GIVE GRANDMA A KISS!'

(from on page 57)

HEY THERE, SONNY! hi, grandma HUH?!

GIVE GRANDMA A KISS!

SPEAK UP, SONNY!

HI, GRANDMA! NO, NOT SINCE 1946! HOW YOU DOING? NO, NOT SINCE 1934! I SAID, HOW YOU DOING? NO, NOT SINCE 1937! OK NO, NOT SINCE 1946! BYE BYE SWEETIE!

How I would do it: puts 'HEY THERE, SONNY! while true said = gets.chomp break if said == "BYE" GIVE GRANDMA A KISS!'

www.it-ebooks.info
E XERCISES FROM C HAPTER 7 response = if said != said.upcase 'HUH?! else "NO, NOT SINCE #{1930 + rand(21)}!" end puts response end puts 'BYE SWEETIE!' SPEAK UP, SONNY!'

158

HEY THERE, SONNY! hi, grandma HUH?!

GIVE GRANDMA A KISS!

SPEAK UP, SONNY!

HI, GRANDMA! NO, NOT SINCE 1934! HOW YOU DOING? NO, NOT SINCE 1942! I SAID, HOW YOU DOING? NO, NOT SINCE 1941! OK NO, NOT SINCE 1938! BYE BYE SWEETIE!

Deaf Grandma Extended
How you could do it: puts 'HEY THERE, PEACHES! bye_count = 0 while true said = gets.chomp if said == 'BYE' bye_count = bye_count + 1 else bye_count = 0 end GIVE GRANDMA A KISS!'

(from on page 57)

www.it-ebooks.info
E XERCISES FROM C HAPTER 7 if bye_count >= 3 puts 'BYE-BYE CUPCAKE!' break end if said != said.upcase puts 'HUH?! else random_year = 1930 + rand(21) puts 'NO, NOT SINCE ' + random_year.to_s + '!' end end SPEAK UP, SONNY!'

159

HEY THERE, PEACHES! HI, GRANDMA! NO, NOT SINCE 1937! BYE NO, NOT SINCE 1937! BYE NO, NOT SINCE 1947! ADIOS, MUCHACHA! NO, NOT SINCE 1938! BYE NO, NOT SINCE 1935! BYE NO, NOT SINCE 1945! BYE BYE-BYE CUPCAKE!

GIVE GRANDMA A KISS!

How I would do it: puts 'HEY THERE, PEACHES! bye_count = 0 while true said = gets.chomp if said == 'BYE' bye_count += 1 else bye_count end = 0 GIVE GRANDMA A KISS!'

www.it-ebooks.info
E XERCISES FROM C HAPTER 7 break if bye_count >= 3 response = if said != said.upcase 'HUH?! else "NO, NOT SINCE #{1930 + rand(21)}!" end puts response end puts 'BYE-BYE CUPCAKE!' SPEAK UP, SONNY!'

160

HEY THERE, PEACHES! HI, GRANDMA! NO, NOT SINCE 1932! BYE NO, NOT SINCE 1935! BYE NO, NOT SINCE 1931! ADIOS, MUCHACHA! NO, NOT SINCE 1933! BYE NO, NOT SINCE 1930! BYE NO, NOT SINCE 1942! BYE BYE-BYE CUPCAKE!

GIVE GRANDMA A KISS!

Leap Years
How you could do it: puts 'Pick a starting year (like 1973 or something):' starting = gets.chomp.to_i puts 'Now pick an ending year:' ending = gets.chomp.to_i

(from on page 58)

puts 'Check it out... these years are leap years:'

www.it-ebooks.info
E XERCISES FROM C HAPTER 7 year = starting while year <= ending if year%4 == 0 if year%100 != 0 || year%400 == 0 puts year end end year = year + 1 end

161

Pick a starting year (like 1973 or something): 1973 Now pick an ending year: 1977 Check it out... these years are leap years: 1976

How I would do it: puts 'Pick a starting year (like 1973 or something):' starting = gets.chomp.to_i puts 'Now pick an ending year:' ending = gets.chomp.to_i

puts 'Check it out... these years are leap years:' (starting..ending).each do |year| next if year%4 puts year end != 0 next if year%100 == 0 && year%400 != 0

www.it-ebooks.info
E XERCISES FROM C HAPTER 8 162

Pick a starting year (like 1973 or something): 1973 Now pick an ending year: 1977 Check it out... these years are leap years: 1976

A.5 Exercises from Chapter 8
Building and Sorting an Array
How you could do it: puts 'Give me some words, and I will sort them:' words = [] while true word = gets.chomp if word == '' break end words.push word end puts 'Sweet! Here they are, sorted:'
(from on page 65)

puts words.sort

Give me some words, and I will sort them: banana apple cherry Sweet! apple banana cherry Here they are, sorted:

www.it-ebooks.info
E XERCISES FROM C HAPTER 8 163

How I would do it: puts 'Give me some words, and I will sort them:' words = [] while true word = gets.chomp break if word.empty? words << word end puts 'Sweet! Here they are, sorted:'

puts words.sort

Give me some words, and I will sort them: banana apple cherry Sweet! apple banana cherry Here they are, sorted:

Table of Contents, Revisited
How you could do it: title = 'Table of Contents' 1], 9], 13]]

(from on page 66)

chapters = [['Getting Started' , ['Numbers' , ['Letters' , puts title.center(50) puts chap_num = 1 chapters.each do |chap|

www.it-ebooks.info
E XERCISES FROM C HAPTER 8 name = chap[0] page = chap[1] beginning = 'Chapter ' + chap_num.to_s + ': ending = 'page ' + page.to_s ' + name

164

puts beginning.ljust(30) + ending.rjust(20) chap_num = chap_num + 1 end

Table of Contents Chapter 1: Chapter 2: Chapter 3: Getting Started Numbers Letters page 1 page 9 page 13

How I would do it: title = 'Table of Contents' 1], 9], 13]]

chapters = [['Getting Started' , ['Numbers' , ['Letters' , puts title.center(50) puts

chapters.each_with_index do |chap, idx| name, page = chap chap_num = idx + 1 #{name}"

beginning = "Chapter #{chap_num}: ending = "page #{page}"

puts beginning.ljust(30) + ending.rjust(20) end

www.it-ebooks.info
E XERCISES FROM C HAPTER 9 165

Table of Contents Chapter 1: Chapter 2: Chapter 3: Getting Started Numbers Letters page 1 page 9 page 13

A.6 Exercises from Chapter 9
Improved ask Method
How you could do it: def ask question while true puts question reply = gets.chomp.downcase if reply == 'yes' return true end if reply == 'no' return false end # # end answer end likes_it = ask 'Do you like eating tacos?' puts likes_it # This is what we return (true or false). If we got this far, then we're going to loop and ask the question again.
(from on page 80)

puts 'Please answer "yes" or "no".'

Do you like eating tacos? yes true

www.it-ebooks.info
E XERCISES FROM C HAPTER 9 166

How I would do it: def ask question while true puts question reply = gets.chomp.downcase return true if reply == 'yes'

return false if reply == 'no' puts 'Please answer "yes" or "no".' end answer end puts(ask(' Do you like eating tacos?')) # This is what we return (true or false).

Do you like eating tacos? yes true

Old-School Roman Numerals
How you could do it: def old_roman_numeral num roman = '' roman = roman + 'M' * (num / 1000) roman = roman + 'D' * (num % 1000 / 500) roman = roman + 'C' * (num % roman = roman + 'L' * (num % roman = roman + 'X' * (num % roman = roman + 'V' * (num % roman = roman + 'I' * (num % roman end puts(old_roman_numeral(1999)) 500 / 100 / 50 / 10 / 5 / 100) 50) 10) 5) 1)

(from on page 81)

www.it-ebooks.info
E XERCISES FROM C HAPTER 9 167

MDCCCCLXXXXVIIII

How I would do it: def old_roman_numeral num raise 'Must use positive integer' if num <= 0 roman = '' roman << 'M' * (num / 1000) roman << 'D' * (num % 1000 / 500) roman << 'C' * (num % roman << 'L' * (num % roman << 'X' * (num % roman << 'V' * (num % roman << 'I' * (num % roman end puts(old_roman_numeral(1999)) 500 / 100 / 50 / 10 / 5 / 100) 50) 10) 5) 1)

MDCCCCLXXXXVIIII

“Modern” Roman Numerals
How you could do it: def roman_numeral num thous = (num tens ones = (num % = (num % / 1000) 100) 10) ) 100 / 10 hunds = (num % 1000 /

(from on page 81)

roman = 'M' * thous if hunds == 9 roman = roman + 'CM' elsif hunds == 4 roman = roman + 'CD'

www.it-ebooks.info
E XERCISES FROM C HAPTER 9 else roman = roman + 'D' * (num % 1000 / 500) roman = roman + 'C' * (num % 500 / 100) end if tens == 9 roman = roman + 'XC' elsif tens == 4 roman = roman + 'XL' else roman = roman + 'L' * (num % roman = roman + 'X' * (num % end if ones == 9 roman = roman + 'IX' elsif ones == 4 roman = roman + 'IV' else roman = roman + 'V' * (num % roman = roman + 'I' * (num % end roman end puts(roman_numeral(1999)) 10 / 5 / 5) 1) 100 / 50 / 50) 10)

168

MCMXCIX

How I would do it: def roman_numeral num raise 'Must use positive integer' if num <= 0 digit_vals = [['I', ['V', ['X', ['L', ['C', 5, 10, 50, 100, 500, 1], 5], 10], 50], 100],

www.it-ebooks.info
E XERCISES FROM C HAPTER 10
['D', 1000, ['M', roman = '' remaining = nil # Build string "roman" in reverse. build_rev = proc do |l,m,n| num_l = m ? (num % m / n) : (num / n) full = m && (num_l == (m/n - 1)) 500],

169

nil, 1000]]

if full && (num_l>1 || remaining) # must carry remaining ||= l # carry l if not already carrying else if remaining roman << l + remaining remaining = nil end roman << l * num_l end end digit_vals.each {|l,m,n| build_rev[l,m,n]} roman.reverse end puts(roman_numeral(1999))

MIM

A.7 Exercises from Chapter 10
Rite of Passage: Sorting
How you could do it:
(from on page 88)

www.it-ebooks.info
E XERCISES FROM C HAPTER 10 170

def sort arr rec_sort arr, [] end def rec_sort unsorted, sorted if unsorted.length <= 0 return sorted end # # So if we got here, then it means we still have work to do. = unsorted.pop

smallest

still_unsorted = [] unsorted.each do |tested_object| if tested_object < smallest still_unsorted.push smallest smallest = tested_object else still_unsorted.push tested_object end end # # # Now "smallest" really does point to the smallest element that "unsorted" contained, and all the rest of it is in "still_unsorted".

sorted.push smallest rec_sort still_unsorted, sorted end puts(sort([' can','feel','singing' ,'like','a','can']))

a can can feel like singing

www.it-ebooks.info
E XERCISES FROM C HAPTER 10 171

How I would do it (well, aside from just using the built-in sort method):
# The well-known quicksort algorithm. return arr if arr.length <= 1 middle = arr.pop less more = arr.select{|x| x < middle} = arr.select{|x| x >= middle}

def sort arr

sort(less) + [middle] + sort(more) end p(sort([' can','feel','singing' ,'like','a','can']))

["a", "can", "can", "feel", "like", "singing"]

Shuffle
How you could do it: def shuffle arr shuf = [] while arr.length > 0 # Randomly pick one element of the array. rand_index = rand(arr.length) # Now go through each item in the array, # putting them all into new_arr except for the # randomly chosen one, which goes into shuf. curr_index = 0 new_arr = [] arr.each do |item| if curr_index == rand_index shuf.push item else new_arr.push item end

(from on page 90)

www.it-ebooks.info
E XERCISES FROM C HAPTER 10 172

curr_index = curr_index + 1 end # Replace the original array with the new, # smaller array. arr = new_arr end shuf end puts(shuffle([1,2,3,4,5,6,7,8,9]))

1 5 4 8 7 9 6 2 3

How I would do it: def shuffle arr arr.sort_by(&:rand) end p(shuffle([1,2,3,4,5,6,7,8,9]))

#<TypeError: wrong argument type Symbol (expected Proc)>

www.it-ebooks.info
E XERCISES FROM C HAPTER 10 173

Dictionary Sort
(from on page 90)

How you could do it: def dictionary_sort arr rec_dict_sort arr, [] end def rec_dict_sort unsorted, sorted if unsorted.length <= 0 return sorted end # # So if we got here, then it means we still have work to do. = unsorted.pop

smallest

still_unsorted = [] unsorted.each do |tested_object| if tested_object.downcase < smallest.downcase still_unsorted.push smallest smallest = tested_object else still_unsorted.push tested_object end end # # # Now "smallest" really does point to the smallest element that "unsorted" contained, and all the rest of it is in "still_unsorted".

sorted.push smallest rec_dict_sort still_unsorted, sorted end puts(dictionary_sort([' can','feel','singing.' ,'like','A','can']))

www.it-ebooks.info
E XERCISES FROM C HAPTER 10 174

A can can feel like singing.

How I would do it:
# The well-known quicksort algorithm. return arr if arr.length <= 1 middle = arr.pop less more = arr.select{|x| x.downcase < middle.downcase} = arr.select{|x| x.downcase >= middle.downcase}

def dictionary_sort arr

sort(less) + [middle] + sort(more) end words = ['can','feel','singing.' ,'like','A','can'] puts(dictionary_sort(words).join(' '))

A can can feel like singing.

Expanded english_number
How you could do it: def english_number number if number < 0 end if number == 0 return 'zero' end # No more special cases! No more returns! # No negative numbers. return 'Please enter a number that isn\'t negative.'

(from on page 97)

www.it-ebooks.info
E XERCISES FROM C HAPTER 10 num_string = '' # This is the string we will return. 'two', 'five', 'eight', 'twenty', 'fifty', 'eighty', 'twelve', 'fifteen' , 'three', 'six', 'nine'] 'thirty', 'sixty', 'ninety'] 'thirteen' , 'sixteen' ,

175

ones_place = ['one', 'four', 'seven', tens_place = ['ten', 'forty', 'seventy' , teenagers = ['eleven', 'fourteen' ,

'seventeen' , 'eighteen' , 'nineteen' ] zillions = [['hundred' , ['thousand' , ['million' , ['billion' , ['trillion' , ['quadrillion' , ['quintillion' , ['sextillion' , ['septillion' , ['octillion' , ['nonillion' , ['decillion' , ['undecillion' , ['duodecillion' , ['tredecillion' , ['quindecillion' , ['sexdecillion' , ['septendecillion' , ['octodecillion' , ['novemdecillion' , ['vigintillion' , ['googol' , # # # # # 2], 3], 6], 9], 12], 15], 18], 21], 24], 27], 30], 33], 36], 39], 42], 48], 51], 54], 57], 60], 63], 100]]

['quattuordecillion' , 45],

"left" is how much of the number we still have left to write out. "write" is the part we are writing out right now. write and left...get it? :)

www.it-ebooks.info
E XERCISES FROM C HAPTER 10 left = number

176

while zillions.length > 0 zil_pair = zillions.pop zil_name = zil_pair[0] zil_base = 10 ** zil_pair[1] write = left/zil_base left = left - write*zil_base # # How many zillions left? Subtract off those zillions.

if write > 0 # Now here's the recursion: prefix = english_number write num_string = num_string + prefix + ' ' + zil_name if left > 0 # end end end write = left/10 left = left - write*10 # # How many tens left? Subtract off those tens. So we don't write 'two billionfifty-one' ... num_string = num_string + ' '

if write > 0 if ((write == 1) and (left > 0)) # # # # # # # else num_string = num_string + tens_place[write-1] # The "-1" is because tens_place[3] is Since we can't write "tenty-two" instead of "twelve", we have to make a special exception for these. The "-1" is because teenagers[3] is 'fourteen' , not 'thirteen' . Since we took care of the digit in the ones place already, we have nothing left to write.

num_string = num_string + teenagers[left-1]

left = 0

www.it-ebooks.info
E XERCISES FROM C HAPTER 10
# end if left > 0 # end end write = left left = 0 # # How many ones left to write out? Subtract off those ones. So we don't write 'sixtyfour' ... num_string = num_string + '-' 'forty', not 'thirty'.

177

if write > 0 num_string = num_string + ones_place[write-1] # # end # end puts english_number( puts english_number( 0) 9) Now we just return "num_string"... The "-1" is because ones_place[3] is 'four', not 'three'.

num_string

puts english_number( 10) puts english_number( 11) puts english_number( 17) puts english_number( 32) puts english_number( 88) puts english_number( 99) puts english_number(100) puts english_number(101) puts english_number(234) puts english_number(3211) puts english_number(999999) puts english_number(1000000000000) puts english_number(109238745102938560129834709285360238475982374561034)

zero nine

www.it-ebooks.info
E XERCISES FROM C HAPTER 10 178

ten eleven seventeen thirty-two eighty-eight ninety-nine one hundred one hundred one two hundred thirty-four three thousand two hundred eleven nine hundred ninety-nine thousand nine hundred ninety-nine one trillion one hundred nine quindecillion two hundred thirty-eight quattuordecillion seven hundred forty-five ...

And that’s just about how I would do it, too.

Wedding Number
I told you I didn’t do this one. It was a joke! Move on!

(from on page 97)

“Ninety-nine Bottles of Beer on the Wall.”
How you could do it:
# english_number as above, plus this: num_at_start = 5 # change to 9999 if you want

(from on page 97)

num_now = num_at_start while num_now > 2 puts english_number(num_now).capitalize + ' bottles of beer on the wall, ' + english_number(num_now) + ' bottles of beer!' num_now = num_now - 1 puts 'Take one down, pass it around, ' + english_number(num_now) + ' bottles of beer on the wall!' end puts "Two bottles of beer on the wall, two bottles of beer!" puts "Take one down, pass it around, one bottle of beer on the wall!" puts "One bottle of beer on the wall, one bottle of beer!" puts "Take one down, pass it around, no more bottles of beer on the wall!"

www.it-ebooks.info
E XERCISES FROM C HAPTER 10 179

Five bottles of beer on the wall, five bottles of beer! Take one down, pass it around, four bottles of beer on the wall! Four bottles of beer on the wall, four bottles of beer! Take one down, pass it around, three bottles of beer on the wall! Three bottles of beer on the wall, three bottles of beer! Take one down, pass it around, two bottles of beer on the wall! Two bottles of beer on the wall, two bottles of beer! Take one down, pass it around, one bottle of beer on the wall! One bottle of beer on the wall, one bottle of beer! Take one down, pass it around, no more bottles of beer on the wall!

How I would do it:
# english_number as above, plus this: num_at_start = 5 # change to 9999 if you want

num_bot = proc { |n| "#{english_number n} bottle#{n == 1 ? '' : 's'}" } num_at_start.downto(2) do |num| bottles = puts "#{num_bot[num]} of beer on the wall, #{num_bot[num]} of beer!".capitalize puts "Take one down, pass it around, #{num_bot[num-1]} of beer on the wall!" end puts "#{num_bot[1]} of beer on the wall, #{num_bot[1]} of beer!".capitalize puts "Take one down, pass it around, no more bottles of beer on the wall!"

Five bottles of beer on the wall, five bottles of beer! Take one down, pass it around, four bottles of beer on the wall! Four bottles of beer on the wall, four bottles of beer! Take one down, pass it around, three bottles of beer on the wall! Three bottles of beer on the wall, three bottles of beer! Take one down, pass it around, two bottles of beer on the wall! Two bottles of beer on the wall, two bottles of beer! Take one down, pass it around, one bottle of beer on the wall! One bottle of beer on the wall, one bottle of beer! Take one down, pass it around, no more bottles of beer on the wall!

www.it-ebooks.info
E XERCISES FROM C HAPTER 11 180

A.8 Exercises from Chapter 11
Safer Picture Downloading
Well, since I was asking you to adapt it to your computer, I can’t really show you how to do it. I will show you the program I actually wrote, though. It’s a bit more complex that the other examples here, partly because it’s a real, working tool.
# ### For Katy, with love. Download pictures from camera card.
(from on page 110)

require 'win32ole' STDOUT.sync = true Thread.abort_on_exception = true Dir.chdir 'C:\Documents and Settings\Chris\Desktop\pictureinbox' # Always look here for pics.

pic_names = Dir['!undated/**/*.{jpg,avi}' ] ] thm_names = Dir['!undated/**/*.{thm}' # Scan for memory cards in the card reader. #driveType 1 is removable disk if x.DriveType == 1 && x.IsReady pic_names += Dir[x.DriveLetter+' :/**/*.{jpg,avi}' ] thm_names += Dir[x.DriveLetter+' :/**/*.{thm}' end end months = %w(jan feb mar apr may jun jul aug sep oct nov dec) encountered_error = false print "Downloading #{pic_names.size} files: " ]

WIN32OLE.new("Scripting.FileSystemObject").Drives.each() do |x|

www.it-ebooks.info
E XERCISES FROM C HAPTER 11 pic_names.each do |name| print '.' is_movie = (name[-3..-1].downcase == 'avi') if is_movie orientation = 0 new_name = File.open(name) do |f| f.seek(0x144,IO::SEEK_SET) f.read(20) end new_name[0...3] = '%.2d' % (1 + months.index(new_name[0...3].downcase)) new_name = new_name[-4..-1] + ' ' + new_name[0...-5] else new_name, orientation = File.open(name) do |f| f.seek(0x36, IO::SEEK_SET) orientation_ = f.read(1)[0] f.seek(0xbc, IO::SEEK_SET) new_name_ = f.read(19) [new_name_, orientation_] end end [4,7,10,13,16].each {|n| new_name[n] = '.'} if new_name[0] != '2'[0] encountered_error = true puts "\n"+'ERROR: next end save_name = new_name + (is_movie ? '.orig.avi' : '.jpg') # Make sure we don't save over another file!! new_name += 'a' save_name = new_name + (is_movie ? '.orig.avi' : '.jpg') end Could not process "'+name+ '" because it\'s not in the proper format!'

181

while FileTest.exist? save_name

www.it-ebooks.info
E XERCISES FROM C HAPTER 11 case orientation when 6 ‘convert "#{name}" -rotate "90>" File.delete name when 8 ‘convert "#{name}" -rotate "-90>" "#{save_name}"‘ File.delete name else File.rename name, save_name end end print "\nDeleting #{thm_names.size} THM files: thm_names.each do |name| print '.' File.delete name end # # If something bad happened, make sure she sees the error message before the window closes. puts puts "Press [Enter] to finish." puts gets end " "#{save_name}"‘

182

if encountered_error

Build Your Own Playlist
How you could do it:
# using the shuffle method as defined above all_oggs = shuffle(Dir[' **/*.ogg' ]) File.open 'playlist.m3u' , 'w' do |f| all_oggs.each do |ogg| f.write ogg+"\n" end end puts 'Done!'

(from on page 110)

www.it-ebooks.info
E XERCISES FROM C HAPTER 11 183

And that’s exactly how I’d do it, too.

Build a Better Playlist
How you could do it: def music_shuffle filenames # # # # # # # # len # We don't want a perfectly random shuffle, so let's instead do a shuffle like card-shuffling. shuffle the "deck" twice, then cut it once. does mix things up a bit. Before we do anything, let's actually *sort* the input, since we don't know how shuffled it might already be, and we don't want it to be *too* random. = filenames.length Now we shuffle twice. l_idx = 0 shuf # # = [] If we have an odd number of "cards", then the right pile will be larger. # index of next card in left pile Let's That's

(from on page 110)

not enough times to make a perfect shuffle, but it

filenames = filenames.sort

2.times do r_idx = len/2 # index of next card in right pile NOTE:

while shuf.length < len if shuf.length%2 == 0 # take card from right pile shuf.push(filenames[r_idx]) r_idx = r_idx + 1 else # take card from left pile shuf.push(filenames[l_idx]) l_idx = l_idx + 1 end end filenames = shuf end

www.it-ebooks.info
E XERCISES FROM C HAPTER 11
# And cut the deck.

184

arr = [] cut = rand(len) # index of card to cut at idx = 0 while idx < len arr.push(filenames[(idx+cut)%len]) idx = idx + 1 end arr end songs = ['aa/bbb' , 'aa/ccc' , 'aa/ddd',

'AAA/xxxx' , 'AAA/yyyy' , 'AAA/zzzz' , 'foo/bar' ] puts(music_shuffle(songs))

foo/bar AAA/yyyy aa/bbb aa/ddd AAA/xxxx AAA/zzzz aa/ccc

Well, that’s OK, I guess. It’s not all that random, and maybe if you had a larger playlist you’d want to shuffle it three or four times...I don’t really know. A better way would be mix more carefully and on every level (genre, artist, album). For example, if I have a playlist that is two-thirds lounge and one-third jazz, I want a jazz song roughly every third song (and rarely two in a row and never three in a row). Further, if I had, among all the jazz songs, only two by Kurt Elling (travesty, I know), then one should be somewhere in the first half of the playlist, and the other should be somewhere in the last half. (But where in the respective halves they appear should be truly random.) And all these constraints must be met simultaneously.

www.it-ebooks.info
E XERCISES FROM C HAPTER 11 185

What I do is find similar songs (let’s say songs on the same CD), mix them up, and spread them out as far away from each other as I can in the next grouping (say, songs by the same artist). Then I do the same for the next level up (say, genre). The nice thing is that this algorithm is recursive, so I can add levels for free if I want. For example, I have a Billie Holiday CD with multiple recordings of one of the songs. I like it, but I’d like those to be spread out as far from each other as possible in the playlist (while respecting all other constraints at higher levels). No problem—I just make a directory inside the CD directory and move the similar recordings all in there, and the recursion takes care of the rest! Enough talk; here’s how I would do it: def music_shuffle filenames songs_and_paths = filenames.map do |s| [s, s.split(' /')] end tree = {:root => []} # put each song into the tree if path.length == 0 # add to current branch branch[:root] << song else # delve deeper sub_branch = path[0] path.shift # like "pop", but pops off the front if !branch[sub_branch] branch[sub_branch] = {:root => []} end insert_into_tree[branch[sub_branch], song, path] end end songs_and_paths.each{|sp| insert_into_tree[tree, *sp]} # # # # recursively: - shuffle sub-branches (and root) - weight each sub-branch (and root) - merge (shuffle) these groups together # [song, path]

insert_into_tree = proc do |branch, song, path|

www.it-ebooks.info
E XERCISES FROM C HAPTER 11 shuffle_branch = proc do |branch| shuffled_subs = [] branch.each do |key, unshuffled| shuffled_subs << if key == :root unshuffled # At this level, these are all duplicates. else shuffle_branch[unshuffled] end end weighted_songs = [] shuffled_subs.each do |shuffled_songs| shuffled_songs.each_with_index do |song, idx| num = shuffled_songs.length.to_f weight = (idx + rand) / num weighted_songs << [song, weight] end end weighted_songs.sort_by{|s,v| v}.map{|s,v| s} end shuffle_branch[tree] end songs = ['aa/bbb' , 'aa/ccc' , 'aa/ddd',

186

'AAA/xxxx' , 'AAA/yyyy' , 'AAA/zzzz' , 'foo/bar' ] puts(music_shuffle(songs))

AAA/yyyy aa/ccc aa/bbb foo/bar AAA/zzzz AAA/xxxx aa/ddd

www.it-ebooks.info
E XERCISES FROM C HAPTER 12 187

It might be hard to tell with such a tiny playlist, but with 500 songs you really begin to appreciate how well this method works.

A.9 Exercises from Chapter 12
One Billion Seconds!
Well, I don’t know your brithday, so I don’t know how you’d do it, but here’s how I would do it:
# I don't know what second I was born.
(from on page 115)

puts(Time.gm(1976, 8, 3, 13, 31) + 10**9) # # And yes, I had a party. It was awesome

(at least the parts I remember).

Fri Apr 11 15:17:40 UTC 2008

Happy Birthday!
How you could do it: puts 'What year were you born?' b_year = gets.chomp.to_i puts 'What month were you born? b_month = gets.chomp.to_i puts 'What day of the month were you born?' b_day = gets.chomp.to_i b = Time.local(b_year, b_month, b_day) t = Time.new age = 1 while Time.local(b_year + age, b_month, b_day) <= t puts 'SPANK!' age = age + 1 end (1-12)'

(from on page 115)

www.it-ebooks.info
E XERCISES FROM C HAPTER 12 188

What year were you born? 2002 What month were you born? 2 What day of the month were you born? 20th SPANK! SPANK! SPANK! SPANK! SPANK! SPANK! SPANK! (1-12)

How I would do it: puts 'Hey, when were you born? input = gets.chomp b_year b_day = input[0..3].to_i = input[6..7].to_i (Please use YYYYMMDD format.)'

b_month = input[4..5].to_i

t = Time.new t_year t_day = t.year = t.day

t_month = t.month

age = t_year - b_year if t_month < b_month || (t_month == b_month && t_day < b_day) age -= 1 end if t_month == b_month && t_day == b_day puts 'HAPPY BIRTHDAY!!' end age.times { puts 'SPANK!' }

www.it-ebooks.info
E XERCISES FROM C HAPTER 12 189

Hey, when were you born? 20020220 SPANK! SPANK! SPANK! SPANK! SPANK! SPANK! SPANK!

(Please use YYYYMMDD format.)

Party Like It’s roman_to_integer mcmxcix!
How you could do it: def roman_to_integer roman digit_vals = {'i' => 'v' => 'x' => 'l' => 'c' => 'd' => 1, 5, 10, 50, 100, 500,

(from on page 120)

'm' => 1000} total = 0 prev = 0 index = roman.length - 1 while index >= 0 c = roman[index].chr.downcase index = index - 1 val = digit_vals[c] if !val puts 'This is not a valid roman numeral!' return end if val < prev val = val * -1 else prev = val end

www.it-ebooks.info
E XERCISES FROM C HAPTER 12 total = total + val end total end puts(roman_to_integer(' mcmxcix' )) puts(roman_to_integer(' CCCLXV'))

190

1999 365

How I would do it: def roman_to_integer roman digit_vals = {'i' => 'v' => 'x' => 'l' => 'c' => 'd' => 1, 5, 10, 50, 100, 500,

'm' => 1000} total = 0 prev = 0

roman.reverse.each_char do |c_or_C| c = c_or_C.downcase val = digit_vals[c] if !val puts 'This is not a valid roman numeral!' return end if val < prev val *= -1 else prev = val end

www.it-ebooks.info
E XERCISES FROM C HAPTER 12 total += val end total end puts(roman_to_integer(' mcmxcix' )) puts(roman_to_integer(' CCCLXV'))

191

#<NoMethodError: undefined method ‘each_char' for "xicxmcm":String>

Birthday Helper!
How you could do it:
# First, load in the birthdates.

(from on page 120)

birth_dates = {} File.read(' birthdates.txt' ).each_line do |line| line = line.chomp # # Find the index of first comma, so we know where the name ends.

first_comma = 0 while line[first_comma].chr != ',' && first_comma < line.length first_comma = first_comma + 1 end name = line[0..(first_comma - 1)] date = line[-12..-1] birth_dates[name] = date end # Now ask the user which one they want to know.

puts 'Whose birthday would you like to know?' name = gets.chomp date = birth_dates[name] if date == nil puts "Oooh, I don't know that one..." else

www.it-ebooks.info
E XERCISES FROM C HAPTER 12 puts date[0..5] end

192

Whose birthday would you like to know? Christopher Plummer Dec 13

How I would do it:
# First, load in the birthdates.

birth_dates = {} File.readlines(' birthdates.txt' ).each do |line| name, date, year = line.split(' ,') birth_dates[name] = Time.gm(year, *(date.split)) end # Now ask the user which one they want to know.

puts 'Whose birthday would you like to know?' name = gets.chomp bday = birth_dates[name] if bday == nil puts "Oooh, I don't know that one..." else now = Time.new age = now.year - bday.year if now.month > bday.month || (now.month == bday.month && now.day > bday.day) age += 1 end if now.month == bday.month && now.day == bday.day puts "#{name} turns #{age} TODAY!!" else date = bday.strftime "%b %d" puts "#{name} will be #{age} on #{date}." end end

www.it-ebooks.info
E XERCISES FROM C HAPTER 13 193

Whose birthday would you like to know? Christopher Pine Christopher Pine will be 33 on Aug 03.

A.10 Exercises from Chapter 13
Extend the Built-in Classes
How you could do it: class Array def shuffle arr = self # Now we can just copy the old shuffle method.
(from on page 123)

shuf = [] while arr.length > 0 # Randomly pick one element of the array. rand_index = rand(arr.length) # Now go through each item in the array, # putting them all into new_arr except for # the randomly chosen one, which goes into # shuf. curr_index = 0 new_arr = [] arr.each do |item| if curr_index == rand_index shuf.push item else new_arr.push item end curr_index = curr_index + 1 end # Replace the original array with the new, # smaller array. arr = new_arr end

www.it-ebooks.info
E XERCISES FROM C HAPTER 13 shuf end end class Integer def factorial if self <= 1 1 else self * (self-1).factorial end end def to_roman # I chose old-school roman numerals just to save space. roman = '' / 1000) roman = roman + 'M' * (self roman = roman + 'D' * (self % 1000 / 500) roman = roman + 'C' * (self % roman = roman + 'L' * (self % roman = roman + 'X' * (self % roman = roman + 'V' * (self % roman = roman + 'I' * (self % roman end end puts [1,2,3,4,5].shuffle puts 7.factorial puts 73.to_roman 500 / 100 / 50 / 10 / 5 / 100) 50) 10) 5) 1)

194

3 5 4 1 2 5040 LXXIII

www.it-ebooks.info
E XERCISES FROM C HAPTER 13 195

How I would do it: class Array def shuffle sort_by(&:rand) end end class Integer def factorial raise 'Must not use negative integer' if self < 0 (self <= 1) ? 1 : self * (self-1).factorial end def to_roman # I chose old-school roman numerals just to save space. raise 'Must use positive integer' if self <= 0 roman = '' / 1000) roman << 'M' * (self roman << 'D' * (self % 1000 / 500) roman << 'C' * (self % roman << 'L' * (self % roman << 'X' * (self % roman << 'V' * (self % roman << 'I' * (self % roman end end # Get ready for the pure awesome... 500 / 100 / 50 / 10 / 5 / 100) 50) 10) 5) 1) # "self" is implied, remember?

p 7.factorial.to_roman.split(//).shuffle

["X", "X", "M", "M", "M", "X", "M", "X", "M"]

Orange Tree
How you could do it:

(from on page 133)

www.it-ebooks.info
E XERCISES FROM C HAPTER 13 196

class OrangeTree def initialize @height @alive end def height if @alive @height else 'A dead tree is not very tall. end end def count_the_oranges if @alive @orange_count else 'A dead tree has no oranges. end end def one_year_passes if @alive @height = @height + 0.4 @orange_count = 0 # old oranges fall off if @height > 10 && rand(2) > 0 # tree dies @alive = false 'Oh, no! The tree is too old, and has died. :(' elsif @height > 2 # new oranges grow @orange_count = (@height * 15 - 25).to_i "This year your tree grew to #{@height}m tall," + " and produced #{@orange_count} oranges." else "This year your tree grew to #{@height}m tall," + " but is still too young to bear fruit." end :(' :(' = 0 = true @orange_count = 0

www.it-ebooks.info
E XERCISES FROM C HAPTER 13 else 'A year later, the tree is still dead. end end def pick_an_orange if @alive if @orange_count > 0 @orange_count = @orange_count - 1 'You pick a juicy, delicious orange!' else 'You search every branch, but find no oranges.' end else 'A dead tree has nothing to pick. end end end ot = OrangeTree.new 23.times do ot.one_year_passes end puts(ot.one_year_passes) puts(ot.count_the_oranges) puts(ot.height) puts(ot.one_year_passes) puts(ot.one_year_passes) puts(ot.one_year_passes) puts(ot.one_year_passes) puts(ot.one_year_passes) puts(ot.height) puts(ot.count_the_oranges) puts(ot.pick_an_orange) :(' :('

197

This year your tree grew to 9.6m tall, and produced 119 oranges. 119 9.6 This year your tree grew to 10.0m tall, and produced 125 oranges. Oh, no! The tree is too old, and has died. :(

www.it-ebooks.info
E XERCISES FROM C HAPTER 13 198

A year later, the tree is still dead. :( A year later, the tree is still dead. :( A year later, the tree is still dead. :( A dead tree is not very tall. :( A dead tree has no oranges. :( A dead tree has nothing to pick. :(

That’s pretty much how I would do it, too: clean and simple.

Interactive Baby Dragon
How you could do it:
# using the Dragon class from the chapter

(from on page 133)

puts 'What would you like to name your baby dragon?' name = gets.chomp pet = Dragon.new name

while true puts puts 'commands: feed, toss, walk, rock, put to bed, exit' command = gets.chomp if command == 'exit' exit elsif command == 'feed' pet.feed elsif command == 'toss' pet.toss elsif command == 'walk' pet.walk elsif command == 'rock' pet.rock elsif command == 'put to bed' pet.put_to_bed else puts 'Huh? end end Please type one of the commands.'

www.it-ebooks.info
E XERCISES FROM C HAPTER 14 199

How I would do it:
# using the Dragon class from the chapter

puts 'What would you like to name your baby dragon?' name = gets.chomp pet obj = Dragon.new name = Object.new # just a blank, dummy object

while true puts puts 'commands: feed, toss, walk, rock, put to bed, exit' command = gets.chomp if command == 'exit' exit elsif pet.respond_to?(command) && !obj.respond_to?(command) # # else puts 'Huh? end end Please type one of the commands.' I only want to accept methods that dragons have, but that regular objects *don't* have.

pet.send command

A.11 Exercises from Chapter 14
Even Better Profiling
How you could do it: def profile block_description, &block # # To turn profiling on/off, set this to true/false.
(from on page 142)

profiling_on = false if profiling_on start_time = Time.new block.call duration = Time.new - start_time

www.it-ebooks.info
E XERCISES FROM C HAPTER 14 puts "#{block_description}: else block.call end end #{duration} seconds"

200

How I would do it:
$OPT_PROFILING_ON = false def profile block_description, &block if $OPT_PROFILING_ON start_time = Time.new block[] duration = Time.new - start_time puts "#{block_description}: else block[] end end #{duration} seconds"

Grandfather Clock
How you could do it: def grandfather_clock &block hour = Time.new.hour if hour >= 13 hour = hour - 12 end if hour == 0 hour = 12 end hour.times do block.call end end

(from on page 142)

www.it-ebooks.info
E XERCISES FROM C HAPTER 14 grandfather_clock do puts 'DONG!' end

201

DONG! DONG! DONG! DONG! DONG! DONG! DONG! DONG! DONG! DONG! DONG!

How I would do it: def grandfather_clock &block hour = (Time.new.hour + 11)%12 + 1 hour.times(&block) end grandfather_clock { puts 'DONG!' }

DONG! DONG! DONG! DONG! DONG! DONG! DONG! DONG! DONG! DONG! DONG!

Program Logger
How you could do it:

(from on page 143)

www.it-ebooks.info
E XERCISES FROM C HAPTER 14 202

def log desc, &block puts 'Beginning "' + desc + '"...' result = block.call puts '..."' + desc + '" finished, returning: end log 'outer block' do log 'some little block' do 1**1 + 2**2 end log 'yet another block' do '!doof iahT ekil I'.reverse end '0' == 0 end ' + result.to_s

Beginning "outer block"... Beginning "some little block"... ..."some little block" finished, returning: Beginning "yet another block"... ..."yet another block" finished, returning: ..."outer block" finished, returning: false I like Thai food! 5

How I would do it: def log desc, &block puts "Beginning #{desc.inspect}..." result = block[] puts "...#{desc.inspect} finished, returning: end log 'outer block' do log 'some little block' do 1**1 + 2**2 end log 'yet another block' do '!doof iahT ekil I'.reverse #{result}"

www.it-ebooks.info
E XERCISES FROM C HAPTER 14 end '0' == 0 end

203

Beginning "outer block"... Beginning "some little block"... ..."some little block" finished, returning: Beginning "yet another block"... ..."yet another block" finished, returning: ..."outer block" finished, returning: false I like Thai food! 5

Better Program Logger
How you could do it:
$logger_depth = 0 def log desc, &block prefix = ' ' *$logger_depth

(from on page 143)

puts prefix + 'Beginning "' + desc + '"...' $logger_depth = $logger_depth + 1 result = block.call $logger_depth = $logger_depth - 1 puts prefix + '..."' + desc + '" finished, returning: end log 'outer block' do log 'some little block' do log 'teeny-tiny block' do 'lOtS oF lOVe'.downcase end 7 * 3 * 2 end log 'yet another block' do '!doof naidnI evol I'.reverse end ' + result.to_s

www.it-ebooks.info
E XERCISES FROM C HAPTER 14
'0' == "0" end

204

Beginning "outer block"... Beginning "some little block"... Beginning "teeny-tiny block"... ..."teeny-tiny block" finished, returning: ..."some little block" finished, returning: Beginning "yet another block"... ..."yet another block" finished, returning: ..."outer block" finished, returning: true I love Indian food! lots of love 42

How I would do it:
$logger_depth = 0 def log desc, &block prefix = ' ' *$logger_depth

puts prefix+"Beginning #{desc.inspect}..." $logger_depth += 1 result = block[] $logger_depth -= 1 puts prefix+"...#{desc.inspect} finished, returning: end log 'outer block' do log 'some little block' do log 'teeny-tiny block' do 'lOtS oF lOVe'.downcase end 7 * 3 * 2 end log 'yet another block' do '!doof naidnI evol I'.reverse end '0' == "0" end #{result}"

www.it-ebooks.info
E XERCISES FROM C HAPTER 14 205

Beginning "outer block"... Beginning "some little block"... Beginning "teeny-tiny block"... ..."teeny-tiny block" finished, returning: ..."some little block" finished, returning: Beginning "yet another block"... ..."yet another block" finished, returning: ..."outer block" finished, returning: true I love Indian food! lots of love 42

www.it-ebooks.info

Index
Symbols
! operator, 54 # comments, 47 <, 41 <=, 42 ==, 42 >, 41 >=, 42 [...] (), 118 ** (exponentiation), 37 :: operator, 40 % (modulus), 37 && operator, 54 ~ in prompt, 6 < (), 89 \n (escape), 104

B
Baby dragon exercise, 128–132 Bed-wetting experiment, 67, 79, 83 Bignums, 28 Blocks exercises for, 143 iterators and, 63 methods and, 147 overview of, 134–135 parameters and, 135 passing to methods, 140–142 specifying, 62 Branching, 43–48

C
Calculator program, 11–12 capitalize (), 34 center (), 34–36 cheat (), 127 chomp (), 27, 57 chr (), 118 Civilization III example, 85 Classes baby dragon exercise, 128–132 Class class, 121 creating, 123–124 exercises for, 115, 120, 123, 133 Hash class, 115–116 instance variables and, 124–127 methods, redefining, 122–123 naming, 112 new vs. initialize, 127–128 Range class, 116 Time class, 113–114 Closures, 134 Command prompt, 5, 9 gets (), 26 Comments, 47 Comparisons, 41–43, 114

A abs, 37 Alphabetizing, 42, 90 Angry boss program, 36 Arithmetic, 11–12 exponentiation, 37 factorials, 84 modulus and, 37 numbers vs. digits, 16 strings and, 15 Arrays, 116 described, 59–61 each (), 62–63 for English number example, 93 exercises for, 66 index numbers for slots, 60 iterators and, 63 methods for, 64–65 variables and, 63 ASCII characters, 34, 90 ask (), 83 Assignment, 19

www.it-ebooks.info
()

207

M ETHODS

compose (), 139 Computers, headaches and, 99 Constants, 40 Conversions, 23–25, 29 Core API, 146

Grandfather clock example, 143 Greenwich mean time (GMT), 113

H
Happy birthday program, 115 Hash class, 115–116

D
Deaf grandma program, 57 Digits vs. numbers, 16 Dir[] (), 107 Directories, overview of, 3 do keyword, 62 double_this (), 73 Double-quoted strings, 103–105 downcase (), 34, 42 DRY rule, xiv, 19, 70 Duby example, 74–76

I
Index numbers, 60 Infinite loop, 51 initialize (), 126–128 inspect (), 138 Installation Linux, 7–8 Mac OS X, 5–7 Windows, 2–4 Instance variables, 124–127 Integer class, 123 Integers, 10, 11, 24, 113 methods for, 123 types of, 28 irb, 145 Iterators, 63

E each (), 62–63, 141 each_even (), 141 elsif keyword, 52 end keyword, 62, 100

English number example, 90–96 Epoch, 114 Exponentiation, 37 Expressions, 77, 105

J
Jaguar, 5 join (), 64

F
Factorials, 84 File.open (), 100 File.read (), 101 Files finding, 107 opening, 100 reading, 101 renaming, 107 saving, 100–101 Fixnums, 28 Floating-point numbers, 10 Floats, 10, 11, 25 Flow control branching, 43–48 comparisons, 41–43 exercises for, 57–58 logical operators, 51–57 looping, 48–51 Folders, see Directories

K
Keywords, 63

L last (), 65

Laziness, as virtue, xiv, 35 Leap year program, 58 length (), 33 Lexicographical ordering, 42 Linux, Ruby installation, 7–8 Lists, see Arrays ljust (), 35, 36 Local variables, 72–76 Logger exercises, 143 Logic exercise, 51 Logical operators, 54 Looping, 48–51

M
Mac OS X, Ruby installation, 5–7 Math object, 40 Methods

G gets (), 26, 49

www.it-ebooks.info
M ODULUS

208

R UBY

about, 30–31 for arrays, 64–65 blocks and, 140–142, 147 comparison, 41–43 defining, 71 English number example, 90–96 expressions and, 77 local variables and, 73 naming, 71 objects and, 30 parameters for, 71–72 procs and, 135–139 procs, returning, 139 recursion and, 82–88 redefining, 123 return values and, 76–80 sorting and, 88–90 from String class, 121 string vs. number, 36 strings, 32–35 wrapper, 89 Modulus, 37

N new (), 112, 121 Newline characters, 103 new vs. initialize, 127–128 “99 Bottles of Beer” program, 57, 97, 98 Numbers arithmetic and, 11–12 vs. digits, 16 integers and floats, 10 programming exercises, 12 random, 38–39 see also Arithmetic; Integers

blocks and, 135 Parentheses, 31, 38 Peanut butter and jelly sandwich example, xi–xii Photos, renaming, 107 PickAxe, 145, 146 Playlist exercise, 110 pop (), 65 print (), 108 private keyword, 132 Procs, 135–139 overview of, 134–135 returning, 139 profile (), 142 Profiling, 141 Programming Angry boss example, 36 as an art form, xiv defined, xii DRY rule of, xiv, 19, 70 languages of, xiii name exercise, 28 numbers exercises, 12 power of, 82 resources for, 145 Programming Ruby: The Pragmatic Programmer’s Guide (Thomas et al.), 146 Psychology survey program, 67, 79, 83 Public interface, 132 push (), 65 puts (), 10, 14, 25–26, 49, 65, 76

Q
Question mark, 118

O
Objects, 30 in arrays, 60 creating, 127 creating and initializing, 126 equalities, 42 instance variables and, 124 saving, 101 YAML and, 101 see also Procs; Classes Orange tree exercise, 133

R rand (), 39, 57

P
Parameters, 71–72

Random numbers, 38–39 Ranges, 116–117 Recursion, 82–88, 93 recursive_sort (), 89 Repetition, see DRY rule require (), 101 Return values, 76–80 reverse (), 32 rjust (), 35, 36 roll (), 125, 126 Roman numerals example, 81 Ruby installation

www.it-ebooks.info
RUBY - TALK

209 swapcase (), 34

YIELD KEYWORD

Linux, 7–8 Mac OS X, 5–7 Windows, 2–4 version of, 3, 6, 8, 146 ruby-talk, 145, 146

Syntax coloring, 1

T
Table of contents exercise, 66 Text editors, 1, 2, 5, 7 TextMate, 5 TextWrangler, 5 Thomas, Dave, 146 “Tim Toady”, 147 Time class, 113–114 TMTOWTDI, 147 to_s (), 33 Troubleshooting command prompt, 9 computer nature and, 99 gets (), 26 strings and numbers, 16–18

S
Saving importance of, 99 “99 Bottles of Beer” program, 98 with one method call, 105 string files, 100–101 YAML and, 101–103 SciTE, 2, 7 Scope operator, 40 Seed, 39 showing (), 125, 126 Slots, 60, 115, 116 sort (), 88 Sorting, 88–90 Spaces, 15, 35 square (), 75 srand (), 39 Standard Library, 146 Strings arithmetic and, 15 arrays and, 118–119 assignment and variables, 19 case of, 34 comparing, 42 conversions, 23–25 described, 14 double-quoted, 103–105 hash slots and, 116 methods and, 32–35 newline characters and, 103 numbers vs. digits, 16 range, 116 spaces and, 15, 35 troubleshooting, 16–18 variables and, 105 YAML, 102

U
Ubuntu, 8 unless keyword, 147 upcase (), 34

V
Variables, 19–21, 22f, 28–29 instance, 124–127 local, 72–76 use of, 105 Versions, Ruby, 3, 6, 8, 146

W
Warning, 31 while keyword, 83 Windows, Ruby installation, 2–4 Wrapper method, 89

Y
YAML, 101–103, 105–107, 110 yield keyword, 148

www.it-ebooks.info

The Pragmatic Bookshelf
Available in paperback and DRM-free PDF, our titles are here to help you stay on top of your game. The following are in print as of July 2009; be sure to check our website at pragprog.com for newer titles. Title Advanced Rails Recipes: 84 New Ways to Build Stunning Rails Apps Agile Retrospectives: Making Good Teams Great Agile Web Development with Rails, Third Edition Augmented Reality: A Practical Guide Behind Closed Doors: Secrets of Great Management Best of Ruby Quiz Core Animation for Mac OS X and the iPhone: Creating Compelling Dynamic User Interfaces Data Crunching: Solve Everyday Problems using Java, Python, and More Deploying Rails Applications: A Step-by-Step Guide Design Accessible Web Sites: 36 Keys to Creating Content for All Audiences and Platforms Desktop GIS: Mapping the Planet with Open Source Tools Developing Facebook Platform Applications with Rails Enterprise Integration with Ruby Enterprise Recipes with Ruby and Rails Everyday Scripting with Ruby: for Teams, Testers, and You FXRuby: Create Lean and Mean GUIs with Ruby From Java To Ruby: Things Every Manager Should Know GIS for Web Developers: Adding Where to Your Web Applications Google Maps API, V2: Adding Where to Your Applications Groovy Recipes: Greasing the Wheels of Java Hello, Android: Introducing Google’s Mobile Development Platform Interface Oriented Design Land the Tech Job You Love Year 2008 2006 2009 2008 2005 2006 2008 2005 2008 2007 ISBN 9780978739225 9780977616640 9781934356166 9781934356036 9780976694021 9780976694076 9781934356104 9780974514079 9780978739201 9781934356029 Pages 464 200 784 328 192 304 200 208 280 336

2008 2008 2006 2008 2007 2008 2006 2007 2006 2008 2008 2006

9781934356067 9781934356128 9780976694069 9781934356234 9780977616619 9781934356074 9780976694090 9780974514093 PDF-Only 9780978739294 9781934356173 9780976694052

368 200 360 416 320 240 160 275 83 264 200 240 280

2009 9781934356265 Continued on next page

www.it-ebooks.info

Title Learn to Program, 2nd Edition Manage It! Your Guide to Modern Pragmatic Project Management Mastering Dojo: JavaScript and Ajax Tools for Great Web Experiences Modular Java: Creating Flexible Applications with OSGi and Spring No Fluff Just Stuff 2006 Anthology No Fluff Just Stuff 2007 Anthology Practical Programming: An Introduction to Computer Science Using Python Practices of an Agile Developer Pragmatic Project Automation: How to Build, Deploy, and Monitor Java Applications Pragmatic Thinking and Learning: Refactor Your Wetware Pragmatic Unit Testing in C# with NUnit Pragmatic Unit Testing in Java with JUnit Pragmatic Version Control Using Git Pragmatic Version Control using CVS Pragmatic Version Control using Subversion Programming Clojure Programming Erlang: Software for a Concurrent World Programming Groovy: Dynamic Productivity for the Java Developer Programming Ruby: The Pragmatic Programmers’ Guide, Second Edition Programming Ruby 1.9: The Pragmatic Programmers’ Guide Programming Scala: Tackle Multi-Core Complexity on the Java Virtual Machine Prototype and script.aculo.us: You Never Knew JavaScript Could Do This! Rails Recipes Rails for .NET Developers Rails for Java Developers Rails for PHP Developers Rapid GUI Development with QtRuby Release It! Design and Deploy Production-Ready Software Scripted GUI Testing with Ruby Ship it! A Practical Guide to Successful Software Projects

Year 2009 2007 2008 2009 2006 2007 2009 2006 2004 2008 2007 2003 2008 2003 2006 2009 2007 2008 2004 2009 2009 2007 2006 2008 2007 2008 2005 2007 2008 2005

ISBN 9781934356364 9780978739249 9781934356111 9781934356401 9780977616664 9780978739287 9781934356272 9780974514086 9780974514031 9781934356050 9780977616671 9780974514017 9781934356159 9780974514000 9780977616657 9781934356333 9781934356005 9781934356098 9780974514055 9781934356081 9781934356319 9781934356012 9780977616602 9781934356203 9780977616695 9781934356043 PDF-Only 9780978739218 9781934356180 9780974514048

Pages 230 360 568 260 240 320 350 208 176 288 176 160 200 176 248 304 536 320 864 960 250 448 350 300 336 432 83 368 192 224

Continued on next page

www.it-ebooks.info

Title Stripes ...and Java Web Development Is Fun Again TextMate: Power Editing for the Mac The Definitive ANTLR Reference: Building Domain-Specific Languages The Passionate Programmer: Creating a Remarkable Career in Software Development ThoughtWorks Anthology Ubuntu Kung Fu: Tips, Tricks, Hints, and Hacks

Year 2008 2007 2007 2009 2008 2008

ISBN 9781934356210 9780978739232 9780978739256 9781934356340 9781934356142 9781934356227

Pages 375 208 384 200 240 400

www.it-ebooks.info

All About Ruby
Programming Ruby 1.9 (The Pickaxe for 1.9)
The Pickaxe book, named for the tool on the cover, is the definitive reference to this highly-regarded language. • Up-to-date and expanded for Ruby version 1.9 • Complete documentation of all the built-in classes, modules, and methods • Complete descriptions of all standard libraries • Learn more about Ruby’s web tools, unit testing, and programming philosophy Programming Ruby 1.9: The Pragmatic Programmers’ Guide Dave Thomas with Chad Fowler and Andy Hunt (992 pages) ISBN : 978-1-9343560-8-1. $49.95 http://pragprog.com/titles/ruby3 Everyday Scripting with Ruby
Don’t waste that computer on your desk. Offload your daily drudgery to where it belongs, and free yourself to do what you should be doing: thinking. All you need is a scripting language (free!), this book (cheap!), and the dedication to work through the examples and exercises. Learn the basics of the Ruby scripting language and see how to create scripts in a steady, controlled way using test-driven design. Everyday Scripting with Ruby: For Teams, Testers, and You Brian Marick (320 pages) ISBN : 0-9776166-1-4. $29.95 http://pragprog.com/titles/bmsft www.it-ebooks.info

Ruby & GUIs
FXRuby

Get started developing GUI applications using FXRuby. With a combination of tutorial exercises and focused, technical information, this book goes beyond the basics to equip you with proven, practical knowledge and techniques for developing real-world FXRuby applications. Learn directly from the lead developer of FXRuby, and you’ll be writing powerful and sophisticated GUIs in your favorite programming language. FXRuby Create Lean and Mean GUIs with Ruby Lyle Johnson (240 pages) ISBN : 978-1-9343560-7-4. $36.95 http://pragprog.com/titles/fxruby Scripted GUI Testing with Ruby
If you need to automatically test a user interface, this book is for you. Whether it’s Windows, a Java platform (including Mac, Linux, and others) or a web app, you’ll see how to test it reliably and repeatably. This book is for people who want to get their hands dirty on examples from the real world—and who know that testing can be a joy when the tools don’t get in the way. It starts with the mechanics of simulating button pushes and keystrokes, and builds up to writing clear code, organizing tests, and beyond. Scripted GUI Testing with Ruby Ian Dees (192 pages) ISBN : 978-1-9343561-8-0. $34.95 http://pragprog.com/titles/idgtr www.it-ebooks.info

Ruby on Rails
Agile Web Development with Rails
Rails is a full-stack, open-source web framework, with integrated support for unit, functional, and integration testing. It enforces good design principles, consistency of code across your team (and across your organization), and proper release management. This is the newly updated Third Edition, which goes beyond the award winning previous editions with new material covering the latest advances in Rails 2.0. Agile Web Development with Rails: Third Edition Sam Ruby, Dave Thomas, and David Heinemeier Hansson, et al. (784 pages) ISBN : 978-1-9343561-6-6. $43.95 http://pragprog.com/titles/rails3 Advanced Rails Recipes
A collection of practical recipes for spicing up your web application without a lot of prep and cleanup. You’ll learn how the pros have solved the tough problems using the most up-to-date Rails techniques (including Rails 2.0 features). Advanced Rails Recipes Mike Clark (464 pages) ISBN : 978-0-9787392-2-5. $38.95 http://pragprog.com/titles/fr_arr www.it-ebooks.info

The Pragmatic Bookshelf
The Pragmatic Bookshelf features books written by developers for developers. The titles continue the well-known Pragmatic Programmer style and continue to garner awards and rave reviews. As development gets more and more difficult, the Pragmatic Programmers will be there with more titles and products to help you stay on top of your game.

Visit Us Online
Learn To Program’s home page http://pragprog.com/titles/ltp2 Source code from this book, errata, and other resources. Come give us feedback, too! Register for Updates http://pragprog.com/updates Be notified when updates and new books become available. Join the Community http://pragprog.com/community Read our weblogs, join our online discussions, participate in our mailing list, interact with our wiki, and benefit from the experience of other Pragmatic Programmers. New and Noteworthy http://pragprog.com/news Check out the latest pragmatic developments in the news.

Buy the Book
If you liked this eBook, perhaps you’d like to have a paper copy of the book. It’s available for purchase at our store: pragprog.com/titles/ltp2.

Contact Us
Phone Orders: Online Orders: Customer Service: Non-English Versions: Pragmatic Teaching: Author Proposals: 1-800-699-PROG (+1 919 847 3884) www.pragprog.com/catalog orders@pragprog.com translations@pragprog.com academic@pragprog.com proposals@pragprog.com