Thanks for this and the other above replies. Regarding inheritance, I once had a conversation with a "application architect" who advised staying away from inhe

Thanks for this and the other above replies. Regarding inheritance, I once had a conversation with a "application architect" who advised staying away from inheritance until you fully grok it, because it's easy to paint yourself into a corner with it (he then disappeared before I could question him further). The only issues I could think of at the time was stuff like say you have a bird class which contains a "fly" method, with duck and emu child classes (now I'm using the dodgy animal examples :P), the duck and most other birds should be able to fly, but the emu and some others should not. What is the better practice way of dealing with this issue? And what other adverse issues can arise when using inheritance? It has been recommended to me in the past that when it comes to systems that require more abstract objects, this is where researching design patterns would assist. However, pretty much all the design pattern literature I can find is not directly related to my current language of choice, Ruby. I can find lots of stuff talking about design patterns in Java and whatever else, which still provides some utility, but is there any books/articles that anyone can recommend on design patterns etc. using Ruby?