Let me just start out by saying, “WOW, what a year April has been!”
It’s getting really hard to stay inside all of the time. All I have to say is thank goodness for take out food and Home Depot. Don’t get me wrong, I enjoy cooking but I want to go to a restaurant to have a beer, a steak and to see my friends and family!
This week, I’ve been spending a lot of time renovating my new home. We have painted the entire house and I learned how to install wood floors, tile, and backsplash. I think I’ve found a new hobby! But I will tell you, I’m exhausted and so sore I can barely move…which I think means I am extremely out of shape haha!
I know how hard this quarantine can be for our mental health so if you need a new buddy, I’m available to chat and help in any way I can. You can find me here on Twitter. I just moved to Denver and would be thrilled to make new friends.
Anyways, lets talk code! In my two previous posts, we’ve discussed Object Oriented Ruby. You can read part 1 here and part 2 here. We talked about the initialize method, setter’s and getter’s and attr accessor. Today I want to dive into instance variables. We will start by jumping back into our cat class. We want the cat’s to be given a name right when they are born. If I had a cat class that looked like this:
class Cat
attr_reader :name
def initialize
puts 'A new kitten was just born!'
end
end
If were to jump into irb and type monty = Cat.new("Monty") I would get an error: ArgumentError: wrong number of arguments (1 for 0). That is because there is only an attr_reader method and we need to add an argument to our initialize method and then say @name = name because we are in an instance method so we have access to instance variables:
def initialize(name)
puts 'A new kitten was just born!'
@name = name
end
Now, if we say monty = Cat.new("Monty"), we will get back: A new kitten was just born! #<Cat: 0x00746c7b193ae0 @name="Monty"> and we can call monty.name and get back: "Monty" which is exactly what we want!
We can go on to do more fun things like giving a cat an age by adding an instance method @born_on to our initialize method and adding an age method:
def intialize(name)
puts 'A new kitten was just born!'
@name = name
@born_on = Time.now
end
def age
Time.now - @born on
end
Now if we make a new cat with timothy = Cat.new("Timothy"), we will get back:
A new kitten was just born! #<Cat: 0x0846c7ta79bb9 @name="Timothy", @born_on=2020-04-16 05:02:54>
Then we can check how old Timothy is at any given time by saying timothy.age and we will get back something like 12.066818 saying he’s 12 seconds old or 120.848104 120 seconds old!
Next week I will most likely jump into another OOP topic. Code code code!
Peace,
Nica