RubyTutor

RubyTutor is an irb tool to help new developers and developers new to using Ruby on the fundamentals of the language.

In order to use it, simply install it:

$ gem install rubytutor

Then go into irb and require it:

$ irb
2.3.3 :001 > require 'rubytutor'
=> true

While RubyTutor is meant to be an irb tool, far be it from me to disallow others from finding other uses for it.

If you wish to add RubyTutor to a project, add this line to your application's Gemfile:

gem 'rubytutor'

And then execute:

$ bundle install

Or install it yourself as:

$ gem install rubytutor

RubyTutor has 4 class methods that can be useful to developers:

• RubyTutor.explain_full(object)
• RubyTutor.explain(object)
• RubyTutor.describe(object)
• RubyTutor.available_methods(object, filter)

explain_full outputs a list of attributes pertaining to the object passed in.

Here is a sample output:

RubyTutor.explain_full 'string'

# >> Instance of Class: String
# >> Value: string
# >> Length: 6
# >> Mutable? Yes
# >> Object ID: 70179170680460
# >> Inherits From: Comparable, Object, Kernel, BasicObject
# >>
# >> Description:
# >> This object is an instance of the String class.
# >> A String object is an expression that can hold
# >> letters, numbers and all sorts of different characters,
# >> as long as they are surrounded by single ('')
# >> or double ("") quotes.
# >>
# >> Type RubyTutor.available_methods String
# >> to see all of the methods available.

explain outputs the first half of explain_full while describe outputs the second half of explain_full.

Examples:

RubyTutor.explain 'string'

# >> Instance of Class: String
# >> Value: string
# >> Length: 6
# >> Mutable? Yes
# >> Object ID: 70179170680460
# >> Inherits From: Comparable, Object, Kernel, BasicObject

RubyTutor.describe 'string'

# >> Description:
# >> This object is an instance of the String class.
# >> A String object is an expression that can hold
# >> letters, numbers and all sorts of different characters,
# >> as long as they are surrounded by single ('')
# >> or double ("") quotes.
# >>
# >> Type RubyTutor.available_methods String
# >> to see all of the methods available.

All descriptions were copied and edited from Ruby-Docs

Sidenote: When passing in a Hash, use the parentheses notation to avoid an error.

RubyTutor.explain({a: 1, b: 2, c: 3})

Lastly, available_methods outputs all the available methods for the object passed in. available_methods also has an optional filter you can pass in. The filter must be a string and the filter only corresponds to the beginning of the method name. In other words, a filter of 'to' will return all the methods that begin with 'to'.

If another object is used for the filter instead of a string, the program will ignore it and return all available methods for the object passed in.

Example output:

RubyTutor.available_methods BasicObject

# >> Available Methods:
# >> !
# >> !=
# >> !~
# >> <
# >> <=
# >> <=>
# >> ==
# >> ===
# >> =~
# >> >
# >> >=
# >> __id__
# >> __send__
# >> allocate
# >> ancestors
# >> autoload
# >> autoload?
# >> class
# >> class_eval
# >> class_exec
# >> class_variable_defined?
# >> class_variable_get
# >> class_variable_set
# >> class_variables
#...(truncated for brevity)

RubyTutor.available_methods BasicObject, 'al'

# >> Available Methods:
# >> allocate

The classes that are currently supported and have descriptions when RubyTutor.describe is called are:

• Array
• Bignum
• Class
• FalseClass
• Fixnum
• Float
• Hash
• Module
• NilClass
• Proc
• Range
• Regexp
• String
• Struct
• Symbol
• TrueClass

Any other class will return No further description available at this time. as a description.

After checking out the repo, run bin/setup to install dependencies. Then, run rake test to run the tests. You can also run bin/console for an interactive prompt that will allow you to experiment.

To install this gem onto your local machine, run bundle exec rake install. To release a new version, update the version number in version.rb, and then run bundle exec rake release, which will create a git tag for the version, push git commits and tags, and push the .gem file to rubygems.org.

Bug reports and pull requests are welcome on GitHub at https://github.com/sunny-b/RubyTutor.

The gem is available as open source under the terms of the MIT License.