Using conditional statements

Now that we know what types of variables we can use in Ruby, let’s give these variables some more practical use.

The if statement

By now, we should all be familiar with the if statement and its structure: if a sentence is true, the code should do or return something.

Let’s take the person hash that we used in the previous section as our base:

person = { "name" => "Oscar", "age" => 35, "is_married" => true, "books_read_this_week" => 2.5 }

Using that, we can create a basic if statement:

if person["is_married"] == true
  puts "Person is married"
end

This is pretty much self-explanatory. This would read: “If the value in person["married"] is equal to true, then print Person is married.” The end keyword limits when the if statement is done – that is, anything after the end keyword is not part of the block...