The Right Tool for the Job

Sooner or later, you're going to need to perform a repetitive task in your programs. Many programming languages allow you to do this with a for loop, and while Ruby does include for loops, there are better tools available to us.

If we want to do something a specific number of times, we can use the .times method, like so:

5.times { puts "Odelay!" }
# Prints 5 "Odelay!"s on separate lines

If we want to repeat an action for every element in a collection, we can use .each:

[1, 2, 3].each { |x| puts x * 10 }
# Prints 10, 20, 30 on separate lines