Methods

Ruby methods are what we refer to as functions in some other programming languages. Many a times, we would want all the statements, operators, and so on that we saw earlier, to be bundled together and used as a single unit. Methods are means to accomplish this feat.

In Ruby, a method name should begin with a lowercase letter. Methods should be defined before they are called upon, otherwise an exception is raised by Ruby.

The syntax to define a method is as follows:

def method_name [([arg [= default]]...[, *arg [, &expr ]])]
end

Let's look at a few different examples to make this syntax more clear.

Example 1—a simple method:

def method
  # Method definition goes here
end

Example 2—a method with two arguments:

def method (arg1, arg2)
   #  Method definition goes here
end

Example 3—a method with two arguments having some default values. This will pass default values to the arguments if the method is called without passing the required parameters:

def method (arg1=val1, arg2=val2)   #  Method...