Ruby For Kids For Dummies

Project 8

Code Breaker

Welcome to the world of encryption, ciphers, and secret messages! Have you ever wanted to send someone a hidden message that only you and the person you’re sending it to could understand? Maybe you came up with a secret code on your own and used it to manually translate a letter or note — but that can be a lot of work. Converting messages into a form that hides their meaning is called encryption, and converting the message back to something that is easy to understand is called decryption. Why not let a computer do that work for you?

In this project, you write a Ruby program that will do the labor-intensive work of encrypting and decrypting your notes. You’ll be able to write your note in your editor and save it as a file. Then you’ll be able to use the project’s program to convert the note into a hard-to-read, encrypted form. The same program will be able to take an encrypted file and change it back to something you can read.

Organizing a New Project

In this project, you use Atom to create and edit your program and to create test files with secret messages. You store this project’s source code in a single Ruby file. The secret messages are stored in other files. You use the terminal program to run, test, and play around with the project code.

If you ...