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

Determining the appropriate size for your library

One important consideration when designing your library is how large you want your library to be. In general, you should have an idea of how large the library could be upfront, even if you expect that in the initial release, the library will be fairly small.

In the previous example, we had a library that converted an Enumerable object to CSV. That's a library with a nice, small scope. However, maybe the conversion of Enumerable to CSV was just our initial need, and we also want to use the same library to support converting Enumerable objects to HTML tables, Word tables, Excel spreadsheets, Portable Document Formats (PDFs), and even more formats through external adapters. Additionally, you want the same library to handle not just Enumerable input but also arbitrary object input, through configurable input convertors registered using plugins.

Those two libraries are probably going to require at least one order of magnitude...