You've already completed the basic introduction to Arrays and are ready to delve deeper. This chapter will cover Ruby's Array in some detail, and demonstrate advanced techniques around the creation and manipulation of arrays.

If you've reached this far on RubyMonk, you've probably come across an expression like this.

This is destructuring. We've broken down the array and assigned its values to zen and life.

This is equivalent to using the bracket form or the at method to extract values. giving you nice a shorthand for doing a sequential breakdown of an array.

What happens when one has a multi-dimensional array? Multi-dimensional arrays are n-element arrays within an array. That is, each element of the array is also an array of n items.

zen and john expectedly select the first two inner-arrays.

It's also possible to write a function and use it in a way as to simulate returning multiple values from it. In practice, this is rarely necessary. But it's fun to know you can!

All this is pretty neat. What is even nicer is that you can use this inside blocks.

This is equivalent to destructuring them manually inside the block instead of the block arguments.

Finish this method to return an array. The method accepts only a two-dimensional array. The elements of the array that this method returns are the sums of the first two elements of each inner-array of the two-dimensional array that is passed in.

If you've noticed in the examples above, destructuring an array is slightly restricting. In the exercise above, more is ignored and simply assigned nil because we're out of elements in the array.

Ruby has a more dedicated way of destructuring using the splat (*) operator.

This is different from our regular way of destructuring by assignment as instead of just splitting the array up into the number of variables present on the left hand side, we're splitting the array up by the number of variables and slurping the rest of the array into the second variable with the splat (*).

This example should make this more clear.

initial here only slurps the elements before 44. This is because we have two variables and last takes away the final value.

What if we add another variable into this?

As expected, initial only slurps [42] from the array. The last two values are assigned to the last two variables.

Modify this expression to slurp the middle portion of this array using a middle variable.

You can also slurp or collate variable number of arguments passed into a method as an array.

You can however only splat the last parameter of a method.

Now write an exercise to calculate the median from a set of numbers. Assuming that median method takes in the list as arguments passed in.

The splat isn't restricted to just the left hand side. You can also use it with Range, String and convert them into Array objects. It's also possible to use this left hand side form to turn array items into method arguments. You can of course, use this with blocks as well.

a is the first element and b is an array containing the rest of the elements.

Hash is often created using the array form that takes in even number of arguments as key-value pairs, or directly, a two-dimensional array with paired arrays.

You can use the splat in this form to create hashes. We're just getting started. We'll take a look at some of the nice methods that Array class provides in the next lesson.