For newly developing Rubyists, self can be a bit baffling. You've learned about the concept of the class, and that each object in Ruby has one. The keyword self is a special variable that points to the object that "owns" the currently executing code. You can think of it as a Ruby program asking, "who am I right now?". Ruby is using the concept of self to determine which execution context to use at any point in the program.

self in Ruby is used in a similar way to this in Object-Oriented JavaScript, with a few key differences that we'll cover over the course of this section.

In these few lessons, we'll demonstrate:

• How the self keyword works
• How to use self within an instance method to refer to the class instance on which that method is being called
• The concept of monkey patching Ruby's built-in classes
• How to use attr_accessor, attr_reader, and attr_writer as needed

In this section, we're going to talk about how to use self, and how to apply self in a variety of situations.