From the instructor’s perspective – Week 4

Review of week 4 in the rails bootcamp class:

Students were introduced to the Ruby language and its syntax — the second programming language they’ve learned so far in the course. On Tuesday and Thursday the students practiced building programs with objects and got see OOP in practice, grappling with important topics like the meaning and use of super, object inheritance, and instance variables. Along with a full day of testing best practices and spec matchers, it was an action-packed week for the new class.

Learning Ruby is a great way to get comfortable with an Object-Oriented language, which is why we make sure to focus on it for a whole week of the program. Making sure that everyone is comfortable working with classes, objects, and methods in the easy to understand and read Ruby syntax is one of the ways we ensure our students walk out of the bootcamp with solid programming fundamentals.

“` ruby

class Fruit

def is_edible

puts “I can eat this”

end

end

class Apple < Fruit

def initialize (type)

@type = type

end

def print_apple_type

puts “I am a #{type} type of apple”

end

end“`

In this example, Apple inherits the is edible method from Fruit “for free”, or, through inheritance. When we create an instance of apple, we will be required to pass the type of the new apple (think Gala, Braeburn, Fuji etc…) and we will be able to print that to the screen.

Not only does experience in ruby set the students up to understand the Rails framework easily, but the easy syntax of the ruby language allows them to quickly uncover some fairly advanced programming concepts.

LEARN about week 5 from student Kari Ann