Methods are a powerful feature for building Ruby programs, they allow you to encapsulate behavior and call the method later on to build the functionality of programs. This is an important section, as we are going to learn about methods in Ruby.

Before we walk through the syntax guide I want to show you a real world Rails application code file called the jobs_controller.rb.

Each one of the items, such as index, show, edit and create are methods. As you may notice, there are many methods in a file, and each of them performs a specific task, behavior or action. You are going to be using these methods day in and day out as a Ruby developer, so it's important you have a firm grasp on what the concept is.

Methods have a specific syntax. It begins with the word def followed by the name of your method. In general, your method name should reflect its functionality or behavior for easy readability. Also, all the words should be in lowercase and snake-case (words joined by an underscore). For example, if I want to create a method that lists out baseball teams, then I would name my method something like this:

def baseball_team_list
end

Also, methods always end with the word end. Your logic goes into the area between the name and the end part of the method. For example:

def baseball_team_list
  p ["A's", "Angels", "Astros"]
end

To access this method, I can simply call the method by its name.

baseball_team_list

And the logic inside the method will get executed.

If you run this code without making the call, it will show you that a method called baseball_team_list exists with the output :baseball_team_list

This is an important item to note. When you simply run a method, the logic inside it does not get executed. If you want to execute the logic, you have to explicitly call the method.

So this is how you create and access methods in Ruby.