Day 11 – Program organization, Part 3 of 3.
Today, Slagell clarifies the difference between classes and modules. As I mentioned back in my review of The Object-Oriented Thought Process, a ‘class’ in object-oriented programming is a noun, a Thing. Like a chair, a sweater, or Slartibartfast. Modules are like adjectives. All the nouns I mentioned above could, in fact, be furry. So, if the chair, sweater, and Slartibartfast were classes, they could be all include the same Furry module.
He also offers an solution for the deck of cards exercise. Rather than creating a ‘collection’ class, Slagell subclassed Ruby’s own Array class for Deck. Fine enough. He starts with the shuffle method within the Deck class, finally moving it to the Array class (as made more sense to me) before wrapping up the chapter.
This post documents my journey through Sam’s Teach Yourself Ruby in 21 days. I’ll be joining Al Abut in his effort to learn Ruby and blog along the way.