Book Image

Polished Ruby Programming

By : Jeremy Evans
Book Image

Polished Ruby Programming

By: Jeremy Evans

Overview of this book

Anyone striving to become an expert Ruby programmer needs to be able to write maintainable applications. Polished Ruby Programming will help you get better at designing scalable and robust Ruby programs, so that no matter how big the codebase grows, maintaining it will be a breeze. This book takes you on a journey through implementation approaches for many common programming situations, the trade-offs inherent in each approach, and why you may choose to use different approaches in different situations. You'll start by refreshing Ruby fundamentals, such as correctly using core classes, class and method design, variable usage, error handling, and code formatting. Then you'll move on to higher-level programming principles, such as library design, use of metaprogramming and domain-specific languages, and refactoring. Finally, you'll learn principles specific to web application development, such as how to choose a database and web framework, and how to use advanced security features. By the end of this Ruby programming book, you’ll be a well rounded web developer with a deep understanding of Ruby. While most code examples and principles discussed in the book apply to all Ruby versions, some examples and principles are specific to Ruby 3.0, the latest release at the time of publication.
Table of Contents (23 chapters)
1
Section 1: Fundamental Ruby Programming Principles
8
Section 2: Ruby Library Programming Principles
17
Section 3: Ruby Web Programming Principles

Learning the pros and cons of abstraction

Unlike in many other programming languages, metaprogramming in Ruby isn't that much different than regular programming. Many other programming languages implement metaprogramming with a preprocessor before compilation or a macro processor during compilation, and there are things you can do in the metaprogramming environment that you cannot do in the runtime environment and vice versa. Thankfully, Ruby has no such restrictions on its metaprogramming. You use the same syntax for metaprogramming that you use for regular programming, and you can do metaprogramming at any time.

The main difference between programming and metaprogramming in Ruby is conceptual. Conceptually in Ruby, metaprogramming operates at a higher realm of abstraction than regular programming. If regular programming in Ruby uses classes to create objects and modify the data in those objects, metaprogramming in Ruby creates new classes and modifies the methods in those...