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

Choosing the model layer

Except in rare cases where you need the absolute maximum performance and are coding directly against the database driver, you will almost always want to use a model layer or other database abstraction layer in your application. Which model layer you choose can have significant performance effects on your application, as well as influence what other libraries you can use in your application.

For SQL database model layers in Ruby, there are only two libraries with significant popularity (that is, over one million downloads), Active Record and Sequel. Active Record is by far the most popular option, due to it being the default model layer for the most popular web framework, Ruby on Rails. Outside of usage in Ruby on Rails, Sequel is probably slightly more popular than Active Record, but there is still a lot of Active Record use outside of Ruby on Rails.

Due to Active Record's popularity, many more libraries integrate with Active Record than integrate...