To use self. or not.. in Rails

Question

I\'ve been coding in Ruby for sometime now, but I don\'t understand when to use:

def self.METHOD_NAME
end

or just:

def METH         


        

Answer 1

self is like the this keyword in Java. It's a reference to the current object instance. If your model code performs an operation on the current object, then you'd probably need a function without self.method_name specifier.