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Ruby Ruby Foundations Blocks Creating Blocks

David Forero
David Forero
5,492 Points
Posted by David Forero
David Forero
5,492 Points

I am having trouble understanding the block concept. It's unclear.

I am having trouble understanding the block concept. It's unclear. Not sure how they work. Seems like Jason is jumping between difficulty levels with in this blocks section.

notf0und
notf0und
11,940 Points

This might help, if you've not already seen it: http://stackoverflow.com/questions/4911353/best-explanation-of-ruby-blocks

Personally, I still don't understand blocks entirely, but it seems to me (and is sometimes explained as) they're essentially anonymous functions. Don't hold me to that, though :P

Good luck with your search for the understanding of Ruby blocks. Maybe Jason Seifer, or another Ruby pro, will stop by and go into more detail.

3 Answers

Maciej Czuchnowski
Maciej Czuchnowski
36,441 Points
Maciej Czuchnowski
Maciej Czuchnowski
36,441 Points

You will get used to it once you write a few methods and blocks on your own and experiment a bit. Here you can do some additional free exercises on methods and blocks: http://www.codecademy.com/courses/ruby-beginner-en-ET4bU/0/1?curriculum_id=5059f8619189a5000201fbcb

(you can jump to exercise 9 if you want, but the first 8 are a good refresher)

Delete Delete
Delete Delete
4,001 Points
Delete Delete
Delete Delete
4,001 Points

Struggled with blocks as well, but I found this video incredibly helpful:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=K8uhD8mtorE

Little long (30 min video), but solid explanation.

Sulu Fiti
Sulu Fiti
2,940 Points

Thanks so much for posting this video. It helped me a lot.

Ginger Bidwell
Ginger Bidwell
12,289 Points
Ginger Bidwell
Ginger Bidwell
12,289 Points

I found the explanations in http://docs.ruby-doc.com/docs/ProgrammingRuby/ (and the newer edition as well) to be really helpful for getting a better understanding of some of the concepts covered in this series - including blocks (in the Containers, Blocks, and Iterators section.)