Determining type of an object in ruby

I’ll use python as an example of what I’m looking for (you can think of it as pseudocode if you don’t know Python):

>>> a = 1
>>> type(a)
<type 'int'>

I know in ruby I can do :

1.9.3p194 :002 > 1.class
 => Fixnum 

But is this the proper way to determine the type of the object?