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

Handling code where everything is slow

Sometimes you have a ball of mud, where everything is slow and you cannot figure out why. This is an unfortunate situation to be in. Unfortunately, there is no general advice that will work in all cases. However, there are a few approaches that you can try.

The best place to look first is code that allocates a lot of objects. Allocating too many objects is probably the most common reason that Ruby code is slow. If you can figure out a way to allocate fewer objects, that can improve performance. This is especially true if you can remove allocations of complex objects that themselves allocate a lot of objects. One library that can help you figure out which places to start reducing object allocations is called memory_profiler, which can show how much memory and how many objects are allocated and retained by gem, by file, and even by line.

Next, see whether there is a way to move code around so that code that is currently executed in the most...