Sams Teach Yourself Ruby in 21 Days

Summary

Over the last three days, we've been discussing the skills and tools that make it possible to confidently develop and maintain projects of any size with Ruby.

We knew about classes and methods almost from the start, but now we know how to use inheritance to concisely express relationships in and among families of similar classes, and how to group related methods into modules so they can be mixed in anywhere they are needed. We've also learned how—and to some extent, when—to separate modules and classes into reusable files.

Taking advantage of these techniques will ensure that even in large programming projects, each piece can be seen, understood, and maintained independently of the whole. That's easy to say, but it's not always easy to ...