Gain insights into Ruby development with 78 tasks tailored for beginners and experienced coders. Explore object-oriented concepts, debug programs, and advance your freelance coding career.

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This self-study course written as a book is your first step towards making money by coding and programming from home, and having fun doing it. You will understand how the Ruby language works, and establish a foundation for being a successful freelance developer. This course gives you not only technical detail, but presents knowledge in a friendly format, understandable by all ages, providing a thorough explanation of modern concepts for absolute beginners.

In this course you will find 78 easy to follow tasks, so even people without any programming skill can solve them. Beginners will learn how to create, debug, and understand programs in Ruby. Those who are already familiar with the language will rediscover object-oriented concepts, memory organization, find career advice, and save the planet from a nuclear apocalypse.

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

The Handbook for Ruby Developers

# Data types
In the previous chapters, we figured out how to join two strings with `"+"`. Also, we know now that we can multiply a string by a number. While experimenting, we found that there are at least two types of data: **strings** and **numbers**, also known as integers. We also learned that a number itself, written in quotation marks, is a string. Let’s see how Ruby understands what a number and what a string is:


 # Experimenting to see how Ruby understands a number and a string
 
 puts "blabla".class
 puts "123".class
 puts 123.class

The documentation says that everything is an object in Ruby. So, the result of any operation is an object. Every object implements a method called a `class`. The expression “implements a method” means that some programmer or developer of the Ruby language made a tiny sub-program or sub-routine that we can run if we know its name. To call this small program of any object, we type out a dot. along with the name of the program.


In our case, situated above the name of this sub-program—also known as a method or a function—is the `class`.


By the way, don’t get confused. There are two things to keep in mind:

* **Method class**: This is what we called above by specifying the dot(`.`).

* `class` **keyword**: This is used to define a class of objects.

If real-life objects could have methods, we would see something like this:


* `Apple.slice`

* `Apple.amount_of_seeds`

* `Apple.amount_of_worms`

* `River.water_temperature`

* `River.amount_of_fish`

This is how every object in Ruby has a method class: `Object.class`.


In the experiment we conducted at the beginning of this chapter, we used `123` (without quotation marks) and `blabla`. These are objects. The type of `123` is an integer. And the type of `blabla` is a string. The type of any object can be obtained by calling the `.class` method.


# Documentation of objects in Ruby
Of course, every object has documentation with the list of supported methods. It’s helpful to look up documentation every time we have questions, and every time we work with this or another type. Here are some documentation examples for different object types:

* [Object](https://ruby-doc.org/core-2.5.1/Object.html) 
* [String](https://ruby-doc.org/core-2.5.1/String.html)
* [Integer](https://ruby-doc.org/core-2.5.1/Integer.html)

Documentation is quite easy to find if we search for “ruby object docs” or “ruby string docs.” Documentation covers everything we can do with an object, and it’s a gold mine of information. Therefore, we shouldn’t ignore it, and it should be our best friend. A programmer who doesn’t like or is lazy about looking up documentation will hardly ever succeed.

Here are some useful links that we can visit:

* [Documentation example for Object.class](https://ruby-doc.org/core-2.5.1/Object.html#method-i-class)
* [Documentation example about multiplying string by a number](https://ruby-doc.org/core-2.5.1/String.html#method-i-2A) 

Learn about the different data types in Ruby.

Before We Begin

First Steps

Fundamentals of Ruby

Conditional Statements

Operators and Methods

Arrays

Hash

Fun with Object Oriented Programming

Debugging in Ruby

Ruby Version Manager

Testing Ruby Programs

Wrap Up!

Appendix

Data Types in Ruby

Data types