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

Considering test complexity

When programming, you tend to reach for abstractions to simplify code and reduce complexity. Since automated testing is just another form of programming, there is a natural tendency to use the same approach when writing tests. However, with abstraction comes indirection, and often complexity. For example, you may have three tests that do similar things, like in the following code snippet:

describe Foo do
  it "should have bar return a Bar instance" do
    _(Foo.new.bar).must_be_kind_of(Bar)
  end
  it "should have baz return a Baz instance" do
    _(Foo.new.baz).must_be_kind_of(Baz)
  end
  it "should have quux return a Quux instance" do
    _(Foo.new.quux).must_be_kind_of(Quux)
  end
end

The programmer's natural inclination is to see the pattern and create an abstraction for it:

describe Foo...