Computer Science Programming Basics in Ruby

10.2 Inheritance

At this point in the book, your programming style is starting to become more sophisticated. No longer are you writing code where one long file encompasses everything you do. Now you are using objects, and you are also beginning to program in an object-oriented manner. Object-oriented programming (OOP) is a powerful form of programming that is currently extremely popular and the backbone for many new languages, including Ruby.

Gem of Wisdom

Object inheritance is one of the most powerful parts of object-oriented programming. Inheritance enables hierarchical decomposition of structures into logically encapsulated units.

Thus far, we have talked about creating simple objects that are independent of one another. However, one of the most powerful abilities OOP has is the ability to define relationships between objects. The first of these relationships is known as inheritance. To understand the concept of inheritance, imagine a ball (any spherical object that could pass for a ball will do). Perhaps you are thinking of a baseball, a tennis ball, or a ping-pong ball; it does not matter which because all those balls have a large degree of similarity among them, despite being different types of balls or even different objects. If we needed to accomplish some task and asked you for a ball, they could all work despite their differences. Inheritance allows us to define these types of relationships with Ruby objects. This ends up saving the programmer significant time and code ...