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

Realizing the actual importance of code formatting

While code formatting is definitely part of programming, and can definitely affect how maintainable your code is; in most cases, the actual formatting of code matters far less than you would initially expect. Outside of egregious cases, you'll probably be able to read two different pieces of code formatted differently, and determine that they accomplish the same thing. On the flip side, there's definitely code that is difficult to understand regardless of how it is formatted.

Focus on the understandability of your code, not the formatting of your code. The main time you should worry about your code formatting is when it negatively impacts the understandability of your code. The other time is when you are formatting for artistic effect:

  def       fed
  ( p       p )
  p?a       a?p...