Live Session: Beginning Ruby Part 2

We cover some basic Ruby concepts that tend to trip up beginners.

Note: This article was originally published on the Launch School blog on 2016–02–26

This is part 2 of our live session series on “Beginning Ruby”. This series is not an introduction to Ruby or programming. Instead, it’s a focused discussion on topics that many people new to programming get tripped up on. To get the most out of this series, you should already have some familarity with basic programming concepts and have been dabbling a bit in Ruby. Those completely new to programming are welcome to watch, but just be aware that you’ll need a little bit of hands on experience first to fully appreciate the discussion.

In this video, we’ll talk about:

• Pass by reference vs pass by value
• Variables as pointers
• Method return value vs side effects

See the entire Beginning Ruby Series

• Part 1 (syntactical sugar, where code comes from, and variable scope)
• Part 2 (pass by reference/value, variables as pointers, method side-effects vs return value)
• Part 3 (Arrays and Hashes, common mistakes when using select and map, and the Enumerable module)

The below video is Part 2 and lasts about an hour.

Erratum We imply that the object referenced by the str variable is mutated with the shovel operator (<<) around the 40:06 mark in the video below. It's actually the string literal "Mr. " that is mutated instead.