We saw in the lesson on classes that Ruby needs methods in order to access attributes. For instance, if we want to access a @name instance variable, we had to write something like

def name
  @name
end

Well, no longer! We can use attr_reader to access a variable and attr_writer to change it. If we write

class Person
  attr_reader :name
  attr_writer :name
  def initialize(name)
    @name = name
  end
end

Ruby does something like this for us automatically:

def name
  @name
end

def name=(value)
  @name = value
end

Like magic, we can read and write variables as we please! We just pass our instance variables (as symbols) to attr_reader or attr_writer.

(That name= might look funny, but you’re allowed to put an = sign in a method name. That’s just a Ruby convention saying, “hey, this method sets a value!”)