A popular way to work with arrays is to push and pop elements. If you've never heard these terms let's walk through some basic definitions:

• Pushing is when you add an element to the end of the array
• Popping is when you remove the last item from the array

These processes are similar to inserting and deleting items, except that the behavior occurs at the end of the array.

Let's walk through these processes with some practical examples. I'm going to start by creating an array with the names of baseball teams:

teams = ["astros", "yankees", "rangers", "mets", "cardinals"]

Now, if I want to push the marlins (which will add the string marlins to the array), I can do it with this code:

teams.push("marlins")

If you check the elements in our teams array, you can see that "marlins" has been added as the last value. I can also push multiple items in the same command, like this.

teams.push("red sox", "blue jays")

These values are added to the end of the array as you can see here:

To pop (aka remove items) from items from the end of the array, we can run the simple command of:

teams.pop

If you run this code, the output will be blue jays. If you notice, Ruby returns this value, so you can store it in a variable and run any process you want with it. For example,

z = teams.pop

Now if you check the value of the variable z, it will have the value red sox.

So, that's how you push and pop with Ruby arrays.