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

Deciding on larger classes or more classes

One of the decisions you will need to make when designing classes is how many classes you should have. The advantage of having fewer classes is that, in general, the code becomes conceptually simpler. The advantage of having more classes is that the code becomes more modular, and it easier to change parts of it. There is a balancing act here. Too few classes can result in large God objects that are difficult to change and refactor. Too many classes can result in conceptual overload, and make it difficult for the programmer using the classes to figure out which classes they need to use.

Let's say you are building a library to handle the construction of HTML tables. This library will take an enumerable (rows) of enumerable objects (cells), and construct an HTML table with table/tbody/tr/td elements, with all the content in the td elements being HTML escaped. One approach is a single class. You can require a standard library to handle...