Welcome to our exploration of handling sorted structures using Ruby. In this lesson, we'll learn about alternative methods to manage sorted collections in Ruby. We'll explore how the SortedSet class and Ruby's built-in sorting techniques can help maintain organized data structures.

In Ruby, a SortedSet, available through the set library, is a collection that automatically maintains its elements in a sorted order based on natural ordering or a custom comparator if defined. It is a collection of unique values. In contrast, a Hash is a key-value pair structure that maintains the order of insertion, preserving the sequence in which the pairs are added, but does not sort its keys or values.

Ruby allows us to define custom classes to create objects that represent our data. For example, you might use a "Person" class to handle employee information or a "Book" class for a library database. Here's a simple implementation of a Person class in Ruby: