Gain insights into Ruby programming by building a hangman game. Learn about fundamentals, practical applications, and develop strong programming skills. No prior coding experience needed.

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TestRuby

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 test_dictionary

Programming is a way to teach a computer how to do something the way the programmer thinks it should be done. Put another way, programming is the description of how to perform some processing. 

In this course, you'll get hands-on experience in programming using Ruby by building a hangman game along the way. In the game, a player chooses a (hidden) word while a second player tries to guess the word. You'll learn to build the hangman game incrementally, and by the end of the course, you'll have a fully functional hangman game while learning the fundamentals of programming. This is a beginner-level course and doesn’t require any prior experience in programming.

The course will provide a strong foundation for the advancement of your programming skills and also pave the way for a career in programming.

Learning to Program in Ruby: By Example

We are going to extend the game also to do the following:
- Ask for a letter.
- Give feedback on the proposal.
- Ask for a letter again.
- Repeat these steps until the player enters the word “stop.”


hidden_word = "hello"

puts "_ _ _ _ _"
puts

loop do

  print "Give me a letter: "

  answer = gets
  answer = answer.chomp.downcase

  if answer == 'stop'
    exit
  end

  if answer.length > 1
    puts "You must give only one letter!"
  elsif hidden_word.include?(answer)
    puts "The letter is part of the hidden word"
  else
    puts "Invalid letter"
  end

end

# Loop implementation  
We added `loop do` at **line 6** and end at **line 25**.

The `do` and `end` words, recognized by Ruby, surround a sequence of instructions called a **block**.
The effect of the `loop` word is to repeat the execution of all the instructions inside the block, without ever stopping. The following diagram shows a simple snippet of code that would indefinitely display `hello`.

The arrows show that the block starts from the `do` word and lasts till the `end` word. It also shows the `loop` that causes the endless repetition.
# Loop termination
To prevent the game from never stopping, we also add **lines 13–15**.

Before checking if the proposal is valid, the lines check if the player typed the `stop` word. If so, we fall on the `exit` word that instructs the code interpreter to stop everything. We tell the interpreter to exit the program.

**Line 13** shows the ease of writing code in Ruby. The double equal sign, `==`, is a message sent to the value named `answer`. This value is a string, and the effect of the message is to check if the string’s contents are the same as the value of what comes after the double equal sign (in this case, `stop`). Therefore, we can write `answer == 'stop'` instead of `answer.== 'stop'`.

# Let’s test our implementation
Press the "Run" button to execute the code.



Learn how to use the loops and nested statements in Ruby.

Before We Begin

Getting Started

Handling Multiple Letters

Improving the Implementation

Declaring Results and Improving Presentation

Generalizing Our Implementation

Wrap Up

Ask for More Letters

Loop implementation