Awhile back, I got bored and started coding a game of Solitaire that could be played in a Ruby IRB shell.

I wanted to finish the game but never got around to it. So I thought of an idea!

What if I screencast test-driving the creation of a card game? That would be an incentive for me to finish the game and people could watch me test-drive a Ruby library and, eventually, a multiplayer web-based card game.

So here is Part 1 of my new screencast series on creating card games in Ruby!

Part 2: Go Fish in Ruby

In this screencast, we:

• Create a Card class that has a Suit and a Rank
• Create a parser for Card names so we can say Card.parse("The Jack of Spades")
• Use const_missing to allow us to reference cards as constants, eg. TheJackOfSpades
• Create a Deck class which holds many cards
• Make it easy to get a standard 52-card deck via Deck.standard
• Make sure we can easily shuffle a Deck of cards
• Add logic so we can easily draw certain cards from a Deck

We leave off with good Card and Deck classes that can be used in our next screencast, when we’ll make our first game!

Note: For the first part of the screencast, I use suite instead of suit … my bad!

You can view the code created during this screencast at: http://github.com/remi/remicasts/tree/playing-cards-1