Definition

Defining a Method

So far you have seen methods that “belong” to objects, or, in other words, are defined on objects, and can be called on objects. E.g. you have seen the method downcase which is defined on every string.

However, Ruby also knows methods that are not defined on any of these objects. They’re sort of “stand-alone” methods.

For example, you can try this in irb:

$ irb
> is_a?(Object)
true

We’ll use this type of methods in this chapter because we want to focus on the characteristics of ...