It's easier to read code that adheres to a coding style guide. It is really important to deliver consistently styled code, especially when sharing cookbooks with the Chef community. In this chapter, you'll find some of the most important rules (out of many more—enough to fill a short book on its own) to apply to your own cookbooks.
As you're writing cookbooks in Ruby, it's a good idea to follow general Ruby principles for readable (and therefore maintainable) code.
Chef Software, Inc. is used to propose Ian Macdonald's Ruby Style Guide (http://www.caliban.org/ruby/rubyguide.shtml#style), but to be honest, I prefer Bozhidar Batsov's Ruby Style Guide (https://github.com/bbatsov/ruby-style-guide) due to its clarity.
Let's take a look at the most important rules for Ruby in general and for cookbooks specifically.