7.2. Method Visibility: Public, Protected, Private

Instance methods may be public, private, or protected. If you’ve programmed with other object-oriented languages, you may already be familiar with these terms. Pay attention anyway, because these words have a somewhat different meaning in Ruby than they do in other languages.

Methods are normally public unless they are explicitly declared to be private or protected. One exception is the initialize method, which is always implicitly private. Another exception is any “global” method declared outside of a class definition—those methods are defined as private instance methods of Object. A public method can be invoked from anywhere—there are no restrictions on its use.