John Joyce
4/27/2008 2:53:00 PM
If you've done C, you've come across the the most important data
structures for it: structs, unions, enums, arrays, pointers, linked
lists
Well, really just knowing what of the standard types to use for what.
With Object Oriented programming (which can be done in C... just not
gracefully) you get other things that are very useful and sometimes
language dependent.
In particular collection or container classes that include arrays and
structs but take things to a new level of convenience.
Hashes are commonly used with key-value pairs (some languages call
them dictionaries or other names)
The most unique to ruby is the old Symbol class. Get the rest of Ruby
and Symbol will make more sense, especially when and how it is useful.
Ruby's other unique feature is its ability to enumerate over its
collection classes with great ease and power.
Beyond that, any data structures book will give you ideas.
Take a look at other people's code too.