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

Using the many types of method arguments

One of the great aspects of Ruby that makes it so flexible and fun to program in is the many types of method arguments that Ruby supports.

The first thing to consider is whether a method needs arguments at all. If you can get a method to work without arguments, that is great, because it eliminates a whole class of possible errors, and you don't even need to think about which types of method arguments to use. Additionally, the caller of the method doesn't have to worry about which types of arguments to pass. There's a whole bunch of complexity you can avoid if your method does not need an argument.

If you look at the public instance methods of Object, accepting no arguments is the most common case. 23 Object methods accept no arguments. The next most common cases are methods that require a single argument, and methods that take a variable number of arguments. 17 Object methods accept a single argument, and 17 Object methods...