Introduction to Self
For newly developing Rubyists, self
can be a bit baffling. You've learned
about the concept of the class, and that each object in Ruby has one. The
keyword self
is a special variable that points to the object that "owns" the
currently executing code. You can think of it as a Ruby program asking, "who am
I right now?". Ruby is using the concept of self
to determine which execution
context to use at any point in the program.
self
in Ruby is used in a similar way to this
in Object-Oriented JavaScript,
with a few key differences that we'll cover over the course of this section.
In these few lessons, we'll demonstrate:
- How the
self
keyword works - How to use
self
within an instance method to refer to the class instance on which that method is being called - The concept of monkey patching Ruby's built-in classes
- How to use
attr_accessor
,attr_reader
, andattr_writer
as needed
In this section, we're going to talk about how to use self
, and how to apply
self
in a variety of situations.