In daily life, lists are all around us. Grocery lists. To-do lists. A dinner recipe has two lists: one for the ingredients, and one for the cooking directions. Your bookshelf is a list of books. There's a stack of plates in your cupboard. An analog clock displays a circularly-arranged list of numbers on its face.
Most of computer programming boils down to managing a bunch of lists. You can see this every day on the internet. Just visit your favorite website and lists will appear like stars in the night sky: the longer you look, the more you'll see.
Consider:
It behooves us, then, to be comfortable with how to manage lists with Ruby.
All lists in Ruby have three things in common:
We will learn about iteration in section 3.
The following chapters will show how to obtain the length and access items of strings, arrays, and hashes.