Perfect! But not all our Ruby methods should be public.

Just as we use public to announce our public methods, we use private to specify our private ones:

class ClassName
  # Some class stuff

  public
  # Public methods go here
  def public_method; end

  private
  # Private methods go here
  def private_method; end
end

private methods are just that: they’re private to the object where they are defined. This means you can only call these methods from other code inside the object. Another way to say this is that the method cannot be called with an explicit receiver. You’ve been using receivers all along—these are the objects on which methods are called! Whenever you call object.method, object is the receiver of the method.

In order to access private information, we have to create public methods that know how to get it. This separates the private implementation from the public interface, and we’ll go over this in more detail in the next two exercises.