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Ruby Objects and Classes

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Creating a Class

3:56 with Jason Seifer

In this video, we create a simple class. The class will be modeled after the concept of a name and return the different attributes a name might have.

Code Samples

class Name
  def title
    "Mr."
  end

  def first_name
    "Jason"
  end

  def middle_name
    ""
  end

  def last_name
    "Seifer"
  end
end

name = Name.new
puts name.title
puts name.first_name
puts name.middle_name
puts name.last_name

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    Now that we know a little bit about how objects and 0:00
    classes work, let's create our own class. 0:02
    We'll start small and create a class for representing a name. 0:06
    Before we jump straight in to coding, let's think about how a name can be structured. 0:11
    We're not going to get into everything that can be possible with a name. 0:16
    But for the purposes of the class we're going to write, a name could have 0:20
    the following items, title, first name, middle name, and last name. 0:24
    We create a class using the class keyword, and 0:31
    then the name of the class that we wanna create. 0:34
    Let's see how that works now using Work Spaces. 0:37
    So let's go ahead and create our first class. 0:41
    I've launched a Ruby Workspace here, and on the left, 0:45
    I'm going to right click and choose new file. 0:48
    And we'll name this name.rb. 0:53
    And this is gonna be a simple class that just returns my name. 0:56
    So let's go ahead and dig in. 1:03
    We start writing a class by using the keyword class. 1:06
    Then we type the name of the class. 1:10
    Using an uppercase letter to start with. 1:14
    In this case, the class name is going to be Name. 1:18
    [SOUND] And then we close it, by writing end. 1:21
    Now, if we wanted to have a longer class name, that was more specific, 1:29
    the convention behind that is doing something like, 1:35
    say, FirstName with no spaces. 1:38
    But we're just gonna keep the name class here, and let's go ahead and 1:43
    think about the different components of a name. 1:48
    First we'll start with the title and 1:51
    we're gonna create methods for all of these different attributes. 1:53
    And we'll say title and I'll go with "Mr." this is a String. 1:58
    And I have a first name, that's Jason. 2:08
    [NOISE] I don't have a middle name but 2:15
    I'm going to return an empty string and 2:19
    I do have a last name, and that's going to return "Seifer". 2:24
    So now that we have this class written, let's go ahead and instantiate it. 2:32
    And let's just print out the name. 2:38
    Go ahead and click into the console and type ruby name.rb. 2:46
    Now this returned, well, pretty much nothing it has the name of the class, and 2:52
    a colon, and a bunch of weird symbols here. 2:56
    And this is actually the address in memory of the instantiated object. 3:01
    But let's go ahead and 3:10
    actually do something with the data that we have inside here. 3:11
    So we'll print out the title. 3:15
    We're just calling a method. 3:18
    [SOUND] And now we are calling all of 3:23
    the different methods of this name object 3:29
    which is an instance of the Name class. 3:36
    Now let's run this again and see what happens. 3:43
    And it did exactly what we expected. 3:48
    And print it out. 3:50
    The results of these different methods. 3:52

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