Types in Depth

Types in Depth

In this lesson — part of Data Deep Dive — you'll learn types in depth in Ruby and why it matters in real work.

Why it matters

Types tell you what operations make sense and catch whole classes of bugs early.

Key ideas

• Common types: text, numbers, booleans
• Type conversion and coercion
• When to be explicit about types
• Type errors and how to read them

In practice

Here's how it looks in idiomatic Ruby:

count = 42          # Integer
price = 9.99        # Float
name  = "Ada"       # String
flag  = true        # TrueClass
puts count.class            # => Integer
puts Integer("7") + price   # string -> Integer, then Float math

Ruby note: Everything is an object, so you inspect a value's type with .class and convert with methods like to_i/to_f/to_s (or the stricter Integer()/Float() kernel methods that raise on bad input).

Try it yourself

Exercise: In Ruby, convert a number to text and back, and print both.

Recap

You now understand types in depth and can apply it in Ruby. Mark this lesson complete and continue to the next one.