Class methods in Ruby on Rails 3 — I'm totally lost!

Question

Background here.

In the above link, the following example is given:

class << self
  def by_author(author)
    where(:author_id => author.id)
  end         


        

Answer 1

Having class << self is also another way to define your methods so that you do not have to call "def self.my_method" or "def MyClass.my_method" for every single method that you are defining as a class method. Instead of calling

  def self.my_method1
  end

  def self.my_method2
  end

class << self
  def my_method1
  end

  def my_method2
  end
end

Cheers!