Question

I’ve been coding in Ruby for sometime now, but I don’t understand when to use:

def self.METHOD_NAME end 

or just:

def METHOD_NAME end 

In any Rails model. Is ‘self’ a modifier like private in Java? When should I use it and when not?. Thanks a ton.

Answer 1

def self.method_name end 

defines a class method.

def method_name end 

defines an instance method.

This is a pretty good post on it.