Classes in Ruby: A Hero's Story

Posted by BeejLuig on June 25, 2017

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This week, I had to put together a demo lesson. I intended to put together a lesson plan, but it came out more like a narrative. So, if you are looking for a little story-based lesson on object-oriented programming with classes in Ruby, this one is for you!

Lesson goals:

  • introduce class construction
  • introduce instance variables/methods
  • use attribute readers/writers
  • instantiate a class object

This lesson assumes some basic Ruby knowledge, such as:

  • data types (String, Symbol, Array, Fixnum, Hash)
  • variables
  • conditionals (if/else)
  • operators (+, -, +=, -=, *)
  • methods/method creation
  • objects

Class Construction

A small town is being ravaged by an evil dragon. A brave hero is needed to save the day, but there is a problem…he/she doesn’t exist yet! It is our job to create the perfect hero and restore peace to the land.

To build our hero, we are going to create a Ruby class. The Ruby docs describe classes like so:

Classes in Ruby are first-class objects…When a new class is created, an object of type Class is initialized and assigned to a global constant.

Everything in Ruby is an object (almost). In order to create a new “hero” object of type Class, we use this syntax:

class Hero
  # variables and methods go here
end

Creating a new hero object is easy, we just call the default .new method outside of the class definition, like so:

# class definition
class Hero
  # Hero behavior goes here
end

# create a new hero!
bob = Hero.new

What we are building here is the blueprint of a Hero. Inside of this class definition, we want to create all of the attributes and abilities (methods) that we would expect a hero to have. When we call Hero.new, we are passing all of those attributes and abilities over to our new Hero object!

#What is bob's class?
bob.class
#=> Hero

Instance Variables

Now that we have our Hero blueprint, we need to fill it with some attributes! Let’s pick a few things any good dragon-slaying hero needs: name, strength, and health.

In order to assign these attributes to instance variables that each new hero object can access, we are going to utilize the magic initialize method that gets called every time a new object is created.

class Hero
  def initialize(name)
	@name = name 
	@health = 100
	@strength = 5
  end
end

Wait a sec, what is this “@” business? The Ruby docs have this to say:

An instance variable has a name beginning with @, and its scope is confined to whatever object self refers to.

In our case, self refers to our new instance of Hero. Instance variables are accessible across all methods within the class. Now, we must pass a name into our new hero creation.

bob = Hero.new("Bob")
#=> #<Hero:0x007ff5480161d0 @name="Bob", @health=100, @strength=5>

Cool! We can see the reference to our new hero, Bob, with all of his attributes. So now, we should be able to access Bob’s health like this:

bob.health
NoMethodError: undefined method `health'

Attribute Readers

Wait, what happened? Everything was going so smoothly! Well, let’s think about this. Our instance variables are accessible to our bob object, but calling bob.health is outside of that scope. In order to access instance variables, we need to wrap our variables in attribute reader methods.

class Hero
  def initialize(name)
    @name = name 
    @health = 100
    @strength = 5
  end
	
  def name
    @name
  end
	
  def health
    @health
  end
	
  def strength
    @strength
  end
end

Ok, can we read Bob’s health now?

bob.health
#=> 100

Nice! But that was a lot of work just to read the data. Fortunately, Ruby provides us with a “magical” method called attr_reader (from the Module Object) that takes care of this for us! All we have to do is pass the names of our instance variables as symbols (and without the @).

class Hero
  attr_reader :name, :health, :strength

  def initialize(name)
    @name = name 
    @health = 100
    @strength = 5
  end
end

So much cleaner! Now let’s think of another scenario involving these instance variables. Right now, our default @strength value gets assigned to 5 on creation. What if we want to create a hero with a little more muscle?

Attribute Writers

Sure, we could add strength as an argument on initialize, but for the sake of the story, let’s say that’s out of the question. Our alternative is to create an attribute writer method. It will look like this:

def strength=(strength)
  @strength = strength
end

This is the basic pattern for all attribute writer methods. Look familiar? it should! Attribute writers tend to look a lot like initialization methods, just for one attribute at a time.

There’s one thing that is important to note here: in Ruby, an attribute writer is expected to have this syntax def method_name=(arg). The “=” is important, because it gives us a little syntactic sugar. When you call an attribute writer, it can look like this:

bob.strength = 8

and Ruby will interpret it as

bob.strength=(8)

Both lines are valid, but the first is so much sweeter. Speaking of sweet, didn’t we have a magic method that took care of all this sort of stuff with attribute readers? Wouldn’t it make sense to have the same thing for writers?

In short, the answers are yes and yes! There is a method called attr_writer for attribute writers too!

class Hero
  attr_reader :name, :health, :strength
  attr_writer :strength
  
  def initialize(name)
    @name = name 
    @health = 100
    @strength = 5
  end
end

Attribute Accessors

We can consolidate even further for any variables that we want both an attribute reader and writer for. The method to do both is attr_accessor. We can use that for our @strength instance variable.

class Hero
  attr_reader :name, :health
  attr_accessor :strength
  
  def initialize(name)
    @name = name 
    @health = 100
    @strength = 5
  end
end

Just a note, we still need to create instance variable definitions within the initialize function if we want that for our class. Ruby isn’t going to do everything for us.

Instance Methods

Now that we have all of the attributes we need in a good hero, it’s time to fight the dragon! Let’s build a method to do it:

def fight_dragon
  # set dragon health
  dragon_health = 100
  
  # both hero and dragon take damage
  3.times do 
    dragon_health -= @strength * rand(3)
    @health -= rand(10)
  end
  
  # whoever has the most health wins!
  # hero gets the tiebreaker
  if @health >= dragon_health
    puts "The dragon is slain!"
  else
    puts "You can't kill #{@name}! I need a break, though."
  end
end

Notice that the instance variables are automatically accessible to the fight_dragon method. Once we add it to the class, our brave hero can meet his destiny!

class Hero
  attr_reader :name, :health
  attr_accessor :strength
  
  def initialize(name)
    @name = name 
    @health = 100
    @strength = 5
  end
  
  def fight_dragon
    # set dragon health
    dragon_health = 100
  
    # both hero and dragon take damage
    3.times do 
      dragon_health -= @strength * rand(3)
      @health -= rand(10)
    end
  
    # whoever has the most health wins!
    # hero gets the tiebreaker
    if @health >= dragon_health
      puts "The dragon is slain!"
    else
      puts "You can't kill #{@name}! I need a break, though."
    end
  end
  
end

bob = Hero.new("Bob")
#=> #<Hero:0x007ff5471e1df8 @name="Bob", @health=100, @strength=5> 
bob.strength = 8
#=> 8 
bob.fight_dragon
# The dragon is slain!
bob.health
#=> 88

We did it! Our hero saved the town! He may even have enough health to hop on a horse and try to save a nearby village.

bob.fight_dragon
# You can't kill Bob! I need a break, though.

Or, maybe not.