rubytarball.tar.gz

Do you want to be an interpreted language geek? Are you tired of getting entangled in the dense syntaxes? Does it irritate you to compile your code to machine language first? Are you looking for an easy-to-use scripting language? Well, Ruby is the best pick for you then!

Ruby is a smart, easy-to-use, functional, Object-Oriented programming language, which comes as a wondrous mix of Perl's scripting power, Pythonic capabilities and much more! As Matsumoto, creator of Ruby, implies: "I hope to see Ruby help every programmer in the world to be productive, and to enjoy programming, and to be happy. That is the primary purpose of Ruby language."

This introductory course will be providing you with hands-on practice with the support of a bunch of interactive illustrations, exercises and the integral topics of variables, built-in classes, objects, conditionals, blocks and much more!

Cool, right? Ready to dive into one of the most influential and demanding third generation programming language? Let's tune in!

Ruby: An Amateur's Pitch

Remember that we said a **block returns a value just like methods do?**  So far, in
our two examples above, we did not do anything with the return values of the
block.

# Example
Here's an example that does that:

p [1, 2, 3, 4, 5].collect { |number| number + 1 }

This will take the array of numbers, and transform it into *another* array.

# Explanation
- It does this by calling the method `collect` on the original array, which calls
the given block for each of the elements and collects each of the return
values returned by the block. The resulting array is then returned by the
method `collect`, and printed to the screen.

- In other words, the method `collect` uses the block as a transformer. It takes
each element of the array, passes it to the block in order to transform it
to something else, and then keeps all the transformed values in a *new* array
that the method `collect` then eventually returns.

- Note that the method `collect` has an alias, which is `map`. These are exactly
the same methods. Many programmers prefer `map` over `collect` because it is
shorter, and also more commonly used in other languages. However, in our study
groups, we use `collect` more often because it simply expresses more clearly
what the method does.


><span>💡</span>
> 
>Use the method <code>collect</code> to transform an array into another array.


Here's another example that uses the return value of the block, can you guess
what it does?

```ruby

```




This lesson discusses how and what a block returns.

Block Return Values

Example

Explanation