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Ruby

Posted by Joshua Richardson
Joshua Richardson
7,644 Points

Setting up workspaces for Ruby

Does anyone know how to use the workspaces for 'Ruby'?

I've tried setting variables then calling them in the console but nothing seems to work. All I can do is 'puts' out text.

Can anyone point me in the right direction to making variables print to the screen? I think I am being a bit blonde. But because of the way I have learnt this part hasn't been explained to me really.

2 Answers

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

Go to Workspaces, click New, enter a name for your workspace, choose Ruby from the dropdown and Ruby template, now you should see a console on the bottom of the window and an empty list of files on the left. Click File, choose New File, name it something (test.rb), open it, write something in it, save it (this step is important! you can use Ctrl + S command on your keyboard, just make sure there is no red dot next to the name of the file) and then in the console make sure the file is there (ls) and write ruby test.rb. This should run the file.

Maciej Czuchnowski
Maciej Czuchnowski
36,441 Points

Everything should look something like this, I created this a minute ago to show you:

http://pbrd.co/1odLHAG

Joshua Richardson
Joshua Richardson
7,644 Points

Thank you so much! You just saved my Ruby career!

Maciej Czuchnowski
Maciej Czuchnowski
36,441 Points

You're welcome. Don't hesitate to ask questions on forums, even if you think they sound stupid. I always try to lurk around and help people, because I remember how overwhelming Ruby and Rails was for me when I first started using Treehouse.

Joshua Richardson
Joshua Richardson
7,644 Points
Joshua Richardson
Joshua Richardson
7,644 Points

That makes me feel much better. I am quite annoyed I haven't used them earlier. But I will definitely start from now.

There is one thing on Code Academy that has been bugging me that you might be able to help with. I will post below:

matz = { "First name" => "Yukihiro", "Last name" => "Matsumoto", "Age" => 47, "Nationality" => "Japanese", "Nickname" => "Matz" }

matz.each { |key, value|
    puts matz[key]
}

The code above worked and passed the exercise. But I don't understand if we are printing out the ''value''... why would I not write:

puts matz[value]

If you could finally clear this up for me that would be great!

Maciej Czuchnowski
Maciej Czuchnowski
36,441 Points

To understand this, you have to be familiar with indexing of elements, which is a common thing for most, if not all programming languages.

Square brackets indicate that you want to see what lies beneath the index you are sending in the square brackets. Let's say you have a string x = "John". Each letter in this string has a default index, counting from 0. So index 0 has the letter 'J', index has the letter 'o' and so on. So if you run puts x[0], it will return 'J'.

In the example you quoted, you are, in a way, creating your own indexing - instead of numbers from 0 to 4, you set the index to be the key variable and its value to be the value variable. So when you run puts matz["First name"], you will get the value that hides under the index which was set as "First name".

Understanding how .each and | | work is very crucial for writing concise code in Ruby and you will encounter this a lot. This goes through each element in the collection of elements and temporarily assigns them to variable(s) between the | | symbols. You can then use those temporary variables inside the block and do stuff to all the elements in one line.

Hope this helped you at least a bit.

Joshua Richardson
Joshua Richardson
7,644 Points

This has again helped allot! I still find it quite difficult to grasp, but at least I understand it! Thank you.

Maciej Czuchnowski
Maciej Czuchnowski
36,441 Points

Do some experiments on your own, you will get there eventually ;)