Ruby by Example

#4 Sound File Player (shuffle_play.rb)

In this script, we’ll make a program that plays music files in a shuffled order. We explored classes in the previous example, and we’ll learn more about them here. What happens when we want to have a class that is very similar to an existing class? We have several options.

Note

This version is fairly Unix-centric. You can download a Windows version that uses the Winamp player at http://www.nostarch.com/ruby.htm.

In Ruby, we know that everything is an object, which is just another way of saying that it’s a member (or instance) of a class. We know about well-defined classes like Arrays, Strings, Integers, and so on. All of these are what we call open classes, meaning that we can add code to existing classes. For ...