Al Abut

Ruby Self-Tutorial, Day 3 of 21: Containers

Wednesday, March 30, 2005

Day 3 - Containers

Update: For those of you reading along online without the book (is this series actually interesting to anyone without it?) you get an extra fuzzy warm bonus for this chapter and this chapter alone: Chapter 3 is online in its entirety at the publisher's website. These are obviously very intelligent and handsome people.

This was an interesting morning - I sat down to do homework and realized they did quite the bait and switch scam on us poor greenhorn saps: we're going to be learning about shipping containers and sea lanes. I thought this was a book about programming? What's this crap about containers?!?!?

Today we look at objects whose only purpose in life is to hold other objects. Containers make programming more convenient in the same way that grocery bags make it easer to get your food home from the store: They reduce the number of objects you have to handle and the number of names you have to remember.

And a special note for those of you following along in real time: I'm going to have to post two days of homework today, since Blogger has been biting my ass having some trouble with their excellent free service and experiencing server slowdowns during a server upgrade.

Results

[to be updated later in the day after completing the chapter]

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