Hashes... that good good!

Now I know what your thinking : But isn't a hash just an array. Sorry that is incorrect; well at least in Ruby. In Ruby a hash is an associative array instead of being indexed like the normal array.
here is an example of a normal array:

variable_1 = [100, 'two', 'knife' 'cheeseburger' ]

now here is an example of a hash:

variable_2 = {"name" => "Sally", "number" => 42, "sports" => ["basketball", "baseball", "Hockey"] }

Assuming you wanted to get the value of the first item in variable_1 you could write code like this:

variable1[0]

however to get the same first item from variable2 your code would look like this:

variable_2["name"]

This is what is meant by `associative array`. You access the value in a hash by there associated keys. A lot like dictionaries in other programming languages. Both arrays and dictionary have class methods of there own but they also share a few.