Mastering Chef

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 ...