As we're thinking of a class in terms of an abstract idea like a blueprint, 0:00 we'll eventually want to get specific. 0:05 Let's use a string as an example. 0:08 Using the variable name set to the string Jason, we have a string class. 0:11 The name is the specific version of the abstract idea of a string. 0:18 We call that an instance. 0:24 The act of creating an instance of a class is called instantiation. 0:26 Once an instance of a class is created we call that instance an object. 0:32 Classes are referred to and 0:39 created in Ruby by using a capital letter, and the name of the class. 0:41 For example, to refer to the string class, we use a capital S, and 0:46 write out the rest of the word. 0:51 Objects are instantiated by using the class name, then a dot, then the word new. 0:53 We've already seen that before, but let's practice that now using Workspaces. 1:01 So, I've launched a Ruby workspace and you'll see on the left side, 1:06 we have myclass.rb. 1:10 We'll get to that in just a minute. 1:12 Let's go ahead and look at instantiating classes. 1:15 So down here I'm gonna just bring the console up. 1:19 And let's start by typing in irb to launch interactive ruby. 1:24 Now first, I'm going to instantiate a new class of a string. 1:30 Now, we can do this by assigning a variable. 1:37 We're just gonna call that string, and then a space, an equal sign, and 1:41 another space. 1:46 And we'll say String, which is the name of the class. 1:48 And you can tell that it's a class name because the S is capitalized. 1:54 Classes are written with capital letters first. 1:58 They we'll type a dot and the word new. 2:02 That will create a new empty string. 2:06 When we call .new, we are initializing a new instance of the string class. 2:10 And we can see what kind of class our variable is 2:18 by calling the class method on the object. 2:22 And in this case it returns String. 2:28 Now, we've seen this before, 2:31 if we wanted to we could also initialize a string with an argument. 2:33 Just like methods have arguments, 2:39 instantiation is also a method which you can pass arguments to. 2:41 So we could call String.new and then pass it a string argument. 2:50 And the same thing works with arrays. 2:57 We've seen arrays before. 2:59 And hashes, these are some built in Ruby types that we've worked with previously. 3:02 We're not gonna get too far into it right now but 3:08 let's go ahead and exit irb and open up myclass.rb. 3:10 Here's a class that I've written. 3:21 And this is just a very, very simple class. 3:22 We'll get a little bit more into writing our own classes in later videos. 3:25 This is just to show an example of the initialize method. 3:29 When you call MyClass.new the initialize method automatically gets called. 3:34 If we were to run this file, we would see, this is the initialize method. 3:41