Understanding symbols in Ruby
Its been an absolute blast so far learning RoR and Ruby. After doing much reading on Rails, I decided to try as much as I could to understad its base (Ruby) technology. So I’ve been catching up on my Ruby for the past week or so, its quite a beautiful language. Coming from PHP/MySQL programming, I have many things to “unlearn” as it were. Now I’m not a hard-core programmer by any stretch of the imagination, I love to dabble though. Also being MAJOR right brained individual, learning logistic programming used to be something of an impossibility for me, but over the years I’ve balanced myself out quite a bit through web scripting.
One of the things in Ruby I had a difficult time grasping was the concept of Symbols, (:sybmol) what they were and what they were good for. For example, from Poignants Guide to Ruby.
Well thats great an all, but I still wasn’t quite sure. I did bit of searching and found an excellent post explaining it in a manner I could process easier over on glu.ttono.us.
If you’re interesting in learning symbols in Ruby from a different point of view.
I found another great article, this one meant for Ruby Newbies but explains the concept of symbols in a programming neutral manner and compares how it can be viewed from different languages.