The Book of Ruby

Attribute Readers and Writers

In fact, there is a simpler and shorter way of creating a pair of get and set accessors simultaneously. All you have to do is use two special methods, attr_reader and attr_writer, followed by a symbol (a name preceded by a colon):

attr_reader :description
attr_writer :description

You should add this code inside your class definition like this:

class Thing
   attr_reader :description
   attr_writer :description
    # maybe some more methods here...
end

Calling attr_reader with a symbol has the effect of creating a get accessor (here named description) for an instance variable (@description) with a name matching the symbol (:description).

Calling attr_writer similarly creates a set accessor for an instance variable. Instance variables ...