You may have noticed that the new user object had nil values for the id and the magic columns created_at and updated_at attributes. Let’s see if our save changed anything:

We see that the id has been assigned a value of 1, while the magic columns have been assigned the current time and date.6 Currently, the created and updated timestamps are
identical; we’ll see them differ in Section 6.1.5. 

                As with the User class in Section 4.4.5, instances of the User model allow access to their attributes using a dot notation:7

As we’ll see in Chapter 7, it’s often convenient to make and save a model in two steps as we have above, but Active Record also lets you combine them into one step
with User.create: 

Note that User.create, rather than returning true or false, returns the User object itself, which we can optionally assign to a variable (such as foo in the second command above). 

              The inverse of create is destroy:

Oddly, destroy, like create, returns the object in question, although I can’t recallever having used the return value of destroy. Even odder, perhaps, is that the destroyed object still exists in memory: 

How do we know if we really destroyed an object? And for saved and non-destroyed objects, how can we retrieve users from the database? It’s time to learn how to use Active
Record to find user objects.