Welcome back! Now that you have a solid understanding of classes and objects in Ruby, it's time to build on that knowledge by exploring inheritance. Consider it a natural progression in our journey into object-oriented programming (OOP).

Inheritance allows you to create a new class based on an existing class. By using inheritance, you can reuse code, add new features, and make your programs easier to manage and understand. Let's dive in and see what it's all about.

In this lesson, you'll understand how to use inheritance in Ruby. We'll cover:

1. What Inheritance Is
2. How to Implement Inheritance in Ruby
3. Why Inheritance Is Beneficial

Inheritance is a way to establish a relationship between a new class (subclass) and an existing class (superclass). The subclass inherits properties and behaviors (methods) from the superclass.

Here’s a simple example:

In this snippet, the Student class inherits from the Person class. It reuses the @name and @age attributes and methods from the Person class and adds a new attribute @major and a new display method to show the student's major.

When you declare a subclass in Ruby, you specify the class it inherits from using the < symbol. The subclass can then extend or override the functionality of the superclass.

In our example:

• The Person class is the superclass.

Inheritance is powerful for several reasons:

1. Code Reusability: Instead of rewriting common functionalities, you can inherit them from a superclass, making maintenance easier and reducing errors.
2. Extension: You can extend existing code by adding new features to a subclass without changing the existing superclass.
3. Hierarchy: It helps in organizing code in a hierarchical manner, which reflects real-world relationships and improves code readability and structure.

Inheritance is a cornerstone of OOP, and understanding it will enable you to design more flexible and scalable applications. It's an essential concept for mastering OOP.

Excited to start practicing? Let's move on and put this theory into action!