Question

I’m creating a card game with multiple classes. Currently, I’m using global variables to hold the $shuffled_deck, $players_hand, and $dealers_hand variables, but I worry when using global variables (perhaps, needlessly) and would prefer to use instance variables.

I’ve been reading around, but nothing is really clicking. Can anyone help point me in the right direction with this?

Using instance variables I haven’t been able to save the @players_hand and @dealers_hand to be able to use them in other classes. For instance, I have @players_hand from the Player class. I have the Dealer class draw a card, but I can’t pull that @players_hand into the Dealer class to add the two together.

My current code is:

class Blackjack

  def initialize
    @player = Player.new
    @dealer = Dealer.new
  end
end

class Dealer

  def initialize
    @deck = Deck.new
    $dealers_hand = 0
  end

  def hit_dealer
    @deck.hit_dealer
  end

  def hit_player
    @deck.hit_player
  end

  def draw_card
    @hit = $shuffled_deck
  end

  def shuffle
    @deck.suits
  end
end

class Player

  def initialize
    $players_hand = 0
  end   
end

class Deck

 def suits
   #code that shuffled the deck..
   $shuffled_deck = @shuffled_deck
 end

 def hit_player
   @hit = $shuffled_deck.pop
 end

 def hit_dealer
   @hit = $shuffled_deck.pop
 end

end

Answer 1

You want to use attr_reader, attr_writer, or attr_accessor. Here’s how they work:

• attr_reader :players_hand: Allows you to write some_player.players_hand to get the value of that player’s players_hand instance variable
• attr_writer :players_hand: Allows you to write some_player.players_hand = 0 to set the variable to 0
• attr_accessor :players_hand: Allows you to both read and write, as though you’d used both attr_reader and attr_writer.

Incidentally, all these do is write methods for you. If you wanted, you could do it manually like this:

class Player
  def initialize
    @players_hand = 0
  end  

  def players_hand
    @players_hand
  end

  def players_hand=(new_value)
    @players_hand = new_value
  end
end