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 about the many design patterns that are built into Ruby

Ruby internally uses many design patterns, supports design patterns in the core classes, and implements design patterns in some standard libraries. In this section, you'll learn about some common design patterns that Ruby uses by default.

The object pool design pattern

With the object pool design pattern, if you need a certain type of object, instead of allocating memory to create a new object, you can reuse an existing object. Ruby's garbage collection system is designed this way. Ruby would be significantly slower and much more prone to memory problems than it already is if it had to manually allocate memory from the operating system each time you created an object. Internally, Ruby uses the object pool pattern to improve object creation speed.

Other than immediate objects such as true, false, nil, symbols, and most integers and floats, all other Ruby objects are stored in an object pool that is referred...