Wrapping Up

In this chapter we looked over the control structures available to the Ruby programmer. We’ve seen that when it comes to control structures, Ruby has our old friends if and while along with less familiar choices like unless and until. Spend the time and you will rapidly discover that having an extensive menu of control structures lets you say what needs to be said with as little fuss—and clutter—as possible.

So much for the control structures. Programs do not, however, live by code alone: There is always that pesky data clamoring to be read, sorted, massaged, displayed, and saved. So in the next chapter we’ll see how you can make effective use of the twin Swiss Army knives of Ruby data structures, the array and the hash.