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Learn to Program, 2nd Edition
book

Learn to Program, 2nd Edition

by Chris Pine
March 2009
Intermediate to advanced content levelIntermediate to advanced
194 pages
4h
English
Pragmatic Bookshelf
Content preview from Learn to Program, 2nd Edition

Chapter 6More 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, ...

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Publisher Resources

ISBN: 9781680500172Errata