Recently I have been learning Nested Arrays, Boolean Enumerables, and Search Enumerables in the Ruby Tic Tac Toe section.
Arrays are like the Marie Kondo of the code world. They organize data and make a collection of information easily accessible. Nested arrays are arrays within arrays, and accessing them is really straightforward. In my Tic Tac Toe lab, I used nested arrays to list all of the possible win combinations according to their index in the board. If I wanted to access the third index of the second win combination, I would just call WIN_COMBINATIONS[1][2], in which the [1] refers to the second nested array ([3,4,5]) and the [2] refers to the third index in that array.
We can also sort and search the collections using Boolean and Search Enumerables. Boolean enumerators such as all?, none?, include?, and any? iterate over each item in an array and return a true or false value based on what is in the array. For instance, to check if the Tic Tac Toe board is full, I have the following method:
The none? enumerator checks each index of the board for an empty spot, and will cause the full?(board) method to return true if it is full, or false if there is still at least one open spot on the board. Search enumerators including select, detect, and reject look into an array and pick out any matching elements. For the won?(board) method I used detect to find and return a winning combination:
Learn.co breaks up the lessons so that I coded a two-player CLI version of Tic Tac Toe in Ruby in these separate chunks. When I got to the method where players actually take turns, I couldn’t figure out which way the final pieces fit together. The “O” player would never get to take a turn if I defined character = “X” in the turn method. I also originally called the turn method 9 times within the play method, which isn’t necessary because the until loop will do that on its own.
After trying many potential solutions, I realized interpolation could help the turn method so that it could automatically tell whether player “X” or “O” is taking a turn, and it worked like a charm:
I defined current_player(board) as
The biggest lesson of all so far is that I need to be cool with my code. Make it almost effortless and don’t overthink it. Keep it simple!
