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

Understanding the most important database design principles

In general, when designing a database structure, you want it to be normalized. Very briefly, here are the basic rules regarding data normalization:

  • Each row can be uniquely referenced by a single column or combination of columns (that is, always have a primary key).
  • Each column should contain a single value, not a collection of values (that is, avoid columns such as artist_names that contain column-separated names of multiple artists).
  • Each column should contain different data than contained in other columns (that is, avoid columns such as artist_name_1, artist_name_2, and so on).
  • Each column in the table is only dependent on the primary key, and not dependent on another column (that is, avoid an artist_name and artist_country column in a tracks table).

There are a lot of books that cover database normalization. Please see the Further reading section at the end of the chapter for some examples. In...