Getters and Setters

Since we are often getting (that is, retrieving) and setting (that is, assigning) variables with objects, it's common to define the methods that get and set those variables. In the previous section, the name method was a getter, and the set_name method was the setter.

Getting and setting variables are quite a common occurrence, and Ruby has a number of different ways for us to set and get variables. One quick improvement is to rewrite the setter method to use the assignment operator.

Let's consider the following example:

class User
  def initialize(name)
    @name = name
  end
  def name
    @name
  end
  def name=(new_name)
    @name = new_name
  end
end
u = User.new("Suzanne")
u.name = "Suzie"

The output will be as follows:

Figure 5.5: Output using = in the method signature

Adding...