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

Refactoring to add features

One common reason to refactor is to add features that are infeasible to implement with the current design. There are two ways to go about this. We'll call the first way the cowboy approach. With the cowboy approach, you just start implementing the new feature and refactor the existing application as needed while you are developing the feature. When you are done implementing the feature, you stop the refactoring.

In the best-case scenario, the cowboy approach saves time. It can also result in the least refactoring changes needed since you only refactor as much as you need to in order to implement the feature you are adding. However, it may result in a partially implemented refactoring, if a full refactoring was not needed to implement the new feature. For the optimistic programmer, the cowboy approach fits better with their natural desire to just get stuff done. It's easy to understand why it is a fairly common approach. Proponents of the cowboy...