Common Ruby Idioms

Question

One thing I love about ruby is that mostly it is a very readable language (which is great for self-documenting code)

However, inspired by this question: Ruby Code ex

Answer 1

a = (b && b.attribute) || "default"

is roughly:

if ( ! b.nil? && ! b == false) && ( ! b.attribute.nil? && ! b.attribute.false) a = b
else a = "default"

I use this when b is a record which may or may not have been found, and I need to get one of its attributes.