Rail Spikes: Understanding map and reduce

Rail Spikes: Understanding map and reduce:

So how do you know when to use map or reduce on a collection? Simple. When iterating through an array, if you don’t want a return value from the operations, use each ; and if you’re looking for a return value, use the iterator method that delivers the type of value you want returned. So if you want to take a collection and return a subset of that collection based on some criteria, use select . (See an earlier article for more.) If you want to return a transformed version of each element, use map . And if you want to return any value whatsoever, or a value that doesn’t match another iterator method, use

Full article: http://railspikes.com/2008/8/11/understanding-map-and-reduce