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  • Book Overview & Buying Polished Ruby Programming
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Polished Ruby Programming

Polished Ruby Programming - Second Edition

By : Jeremy Evans
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Polished Ruby Programming

Polished Ruby Programming

By: Jeremy Evans

Overview of this book

Most successful Ruby applications become more difficult to maintain as the codebase grows in size. Polished Ruby Programming, 2nd Edition provides you with the skills and advice you need to design Ruby programs and libraries that are robust, performant, scalable, and maintainable. The book takes you through possible implementation approaches for many common programming situations, discusses the trade-offs inherent in each approach, and explains why you may sometimes choose to use different approaches. You'll start by learning fundamental Ruby programming principles, 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 topics such as library design, metaprogramming, domain-specific languages, and refactoring. Finally, you'll learn about the pros and cons of different approaches to concurrency, what you should consider when deciding whether to use static types in your Ruby code, and how best to optimize your Ruby code. The 2nd edition of Polished Ruby Programming has been updated to include relevant changes between Ruby 3.0 and 4.0. While most principles discussed in the book apply to all recent Ruby versions, some of the content in the book is specific to Ruby 4.0, the latest release at the time of publication.
Table of Contents (20 chapters)
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18
Other Books You May Enjoy
19
Index

Understanding how symbols differ from strings

One of the most useful but misunderstood aspects of Ruby is the difference between symbols and strings. One reason for this is there are certain Ruby methods that deal with symbols, but will still accept strings, as well as methods that perform string-like operations on a symbol. Another reason is the popularity of Rails, and its pervasive use of ActiveSupport::HashWithIndifferentAccess, which allows you to use either a string or a symbol for accessing the same data. However, symbols and strings are very different internally, and serve completely different purposes. As Ruby is focused on programmer happiness and productivity, it will often automatically convert a string to a symbol if it needs a symbol, or a symbol to a string if it needs a string.

A string in Ruby is a series of characters or bytes, useful for storing text or binary data. Unless the string is frozen, you can append to it, modify existing characters in it, or replace it with...

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Polished Ruby Programming
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