How to create a node for a linked list?

how to create a node for a linked list?

In this Blog post we are going to understand how can one create a node for a linked list, and in the next post we are going to see how we can connect those nodes.

OK Let’s Get started!

I would highly recommend you to first learn about what is attr_accessor in ruby, from one of my blog posts here.

so now if you know what is attr_accessor, just continue to read this story.

First what we need is the skeleton of Node. right?

let’s see how it looks in the code?

class Node
  attr_accessor :value, :next
  
  def initialize(value, nex)
    @value = value
    @next = nex
  end
end

In the above code I’ve created a class Node. and created a constructor in the class Node.

so what this will be doing is whenever we will be initialising the object of class Node with some parameters , those parameters will be set in the instance variable @value and @next .

Now we created this class to use it inside another class called LinkedList.

SO let’s see how LinkedList class skeleton looks like in the code:

class LinkedList
  attr_accessor :node
  
  def push(value: nil, nex: nil)
    @node = Node.new(value, nex)
  end
end

Above you can see that we created a class called LinkedList.

And you can see two parts inside the above LinkedList class.

1. attr_accessor :node
2. instance method push

In the first part we have created a attr_accessor ‘node’ so that we can use it for the linkedlist object.

In the second part we have created a instance method push.

we are going to use method push to the object of LinkedList class.

what is done in the method ‘push’ ?

In the method push we have created a object of Node class, with 2 arguments to it’s constructor value and nex. Which will be creating a Node for us!

And then that node will be returned by the method,

Now?

hmm?

WE JUST LEARNT HOW TO CREATE A NODE FOR A LINKED LIST 🎉🎉

Let’s see how the code looks like

class Node
  attr_accessor :value, :next
  
  def initialize(value, nex)
    @value = value
    @next = nex
  end
end
class LinkedList
  attr_accessor :node
  
  def push(value: nil, nex: nil)
    @node = Node.new(value, nex)
  end
end

# Created object of LinkedList
linked_list = LinkedList.new
p linked_list.push(value: 2)
p linked_list.push(value: 1)

Just Copy and Paste the above code in your editor and see it in action.

Thanks for giving it a read!

Stay tuned for the next posts on complete Linked List implementation.

Happy coding!

Click me to see the second part of the post