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As we’ve been going along learning Ruby, we’ve been working with various types — numbers, strings, arrays, and hashes. Ruby calls these things classes. In this video, we'll learn a bit about what classes are and how to use them.
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[MUSIC]
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As we've been going along learning Ruby, we've been working with various types.
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Numbers, strings, arrays, and hashes.
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We haven't gotten too far along into what they actually are under the hood though.
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Although we've been calling these types, Ruby calls these things classes.
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The types that we've been using so far are all built into Ruby and
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come along with it when you download or install Ruby as part of Ruby's core API.
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We're not limited to working only with the built in classes that
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Ruby provides for us.
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We can also create our own.
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Why would we wanna do this?
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Well, I'm so glad you asked.
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As we're going along creating a program,
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it can be cumbersome to remember each small nuanced part of
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what we're working with and remember those parts in terms that computers understand.
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We start to abstract that away using representations of
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things we're used to in the real world.
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These representations are called classes.
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You can think of a class as a blueprint.
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The blueprint tells Ruby how a class should be structured and
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what it should do.
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For example, a blueprint of a car would show how a car can be made.
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What it doesn't do is get into the specific details about an individual car,
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like the color.
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