classes

An interesting thing about object-oriented programming is that everything is an object and objects inherit characteristics from their parents and pass them on to their children. By organizing a set of objects this way, you can classify similar objects as well.

Let’s look at an example of this in the real world. You could look at cars, animals, video games, or whatever you want. We’ll examine schools!

So there are a ton of different schools: Preschool, Kindergarten, Elementary School, High School, College, Business School, Dev Bootcamp, you get the picture. Each one of these could be part of the Class School and inherit the things in common between all schools like a name, students, teachers, subjects, classes, etc. Similarly, Schools in general can be part of the Class Organization.

This is how it would look in code:

Class School

  attr_reader :name, :students, :teachers

  def initialize(name, students, teachers)
    @name = name
    @students = students
    @teachers = teachers
  end

  def student_teacher_ratio
    @student.to_f / @teacher
  end

end

This creates the Class School and allows you to make new schools with the traits they have in common: name, students, and teachers in this simplified case.

To use the Class, you would create a new instance like this:

dev_bootcamp = School.new("Dev Bootcamp", 60, 6)

This sets the instance variables in the dev_bootcamp instance. @name would be set to “Dev Bootcamp”, @students would equal 60, and @teachers would equal 6.

If you wanted to see what the name, students, teachers, and student/teacher ratio was, then you could call the instance methods on the object dev_bootcamp like so:

puts dev_bootcamp.name
puts dev_bootcamp.students
puts dev_bootcamp.teachers
puts dev_bootcamp.student_teacher_ratio

# Outputs:
# Dev Bootcamp
# 60
# 6
# 10.0

This is just a basic example, but you can easily image adding many more attributes to the class and all sorts of instance methods for statistics or getting other information.