Learn to Program

Note that you could have left out the private keyword and made all of your methods public. But it’s good, clean design to distinguish between things you can do to a dragon and things that are internal mechanisms of the dragon.

So, you def(ined) the method say_moo. (Method names, like variable names, almost always start with a lowercase letter.

One way you could think of this is that a class is kind of like a cookie cutter: every time you call new on that class, you get a new cookie that’s defined by the shape of that cookie cutter. You’d never try to take a bite out of a cookie cutter, because a cookie cutter isn’t a cookie. Similarly, a class is a different kind of thing from the object

The only one of these that might trick you is ||. In English, we often use “or” to mean “one or the other, but not both.” For example, I might say to my kids, ”For dessert, you can have pie or cake.” I did not mean they could have them both. A computer, on the other hand, uses || to mean “one or the other, or both.” (Another way of saying it is “at

Here, you create a proc—which I think is supposed to be short for procedure, but far more important, it rhymes with block—that holds the block of code. You then call the proc three times. This process is a lot like a method. In fact, blocks (and thus procs) can take parameters exactly like methods do. Here’s how it looks: ​1: do_you_like = Proc.​ne

Methods That Take Procs When you pass a proc into a method, you can control when the proc is called, how many times it’s called, or even if it’s called at all.

The methods new and initialize work hand in hand. You use new to create a new object, and initialize is then called automatically (if you defined it in your class). They pretty much happen at the same time. How do you keep them straight?

You’ll notice the -0700 and -0800 in these times. That’s to account for the difference between the local time and Coordinated Universal Time, or UTC.

One last thing to note: on line 13 you broke out of the loop without using break. This is because return exits the method immediately, even in a loop. (You could have added a break right after return, but that code would never be reached because of the return, so there wouldn’t be much point.)