Effective Ruby: 48 Specific Ways to Write Better Ruby

Series
Addison-Wesley
Author
Peter J. Jones  
Publisher
Addison-Wesley
Cover
Softcover
Edition
1
Language
English
Pub.-date
September 2014
ISBN13
9780133846973
ISBN
0133846970
Related Titles


Product detail

Title no longer available

Description

This book uniquely advises Ruby programmers on the techniques that expert programmers employ on a daily basis. Each chapter focuses on the major divisions of the Ruby programming language such as Modules and Exceptions. Within each chapter are specific, actionable guidelines formatted as technical essays and referred to as items. Intermediate-level Ruby programmers can use this book to gain the insight and intuition used by experts to write maintainable, robust software.

Features

  • Focuses on the major divisions of the Ruby programming language
  • Each chapter contains guidelines serve as carefully worded advice supported by detailed technical arguments
  • Table of contents acts as a guide which can be implemented by a static analysis (linting) tool

Table of Contents

Foreword xi

Preface xiii

Acknowledgments xvii

About the Author xix

 

Chapter 1: Accustoming Yourself to Ruby 1

Item 1: Understand What Ruby Considers to Be True 1

Item 2: Treat All Objects as If They Could Be nil 3

Item 3: Avoid Ruby’s Cryptic Perlisms 6

Item 4: Be Aware That Constants Are Mutable 9

Item 5: Pay Attention to Run-Time Warnings 12

 

Chapter 2: Classes, Objects, and Modules 17

Item 6: Know How Ruby Builds Inheritance Hierarchies 17

Item 7: Be Aware of the Different Behaviors of super 24

Item 8: Invoke super When Initializing Subclasses 28

Item 9: Be Alert for Ruby’s Most Vexing Parse 31

Item 10: Prefer Struct to Hash for Structured Data 35

Item 11: Create Namespaces by Nesting Code in Modules 38

Item 12: Understand the Different Flavors of Equality 43

Item 13: Implement Comparison via “<=>” and the Comparable Module 49

Item 14: Share Private State through Protected Methods 53

Item 15: Prefer Class Instance Variables to Class Variables 55

 

Chapter 3: Collections 59

Item 16: Duplicate Collections Passed as Arguments before Mutating Them 59

Item 17: Use the Array Method to Convert nil and Scalar Objects into Arrays 63

Item 18: Consider Set for Efficient Element Inclusion Checking 66

Item 19: Know How to Fold Collections with reduce 70

Item 20: Consider Using a Default Hash Value 74

Item 21: Prefer Delegation to Inheriting from Collection Classes 79

 

Chapter 4: Exceptions 85

Item 22: Prefer Custom Exceptions to Raising Strings 85

Item 23: Rescue the Most Specific Exception Possible 90

Item 24: Manage Resources with Blocks and ensure 94

Item 25: Exit ensure Clauses by Flowing Off the End 97

Item 26: Bound retry Attempts, Vary Their Frequency, and Keep an Audit Trail 100

Item 27: Prefer throw to raise for Jumping Out of Scope 104

 

Chapter 5: Metaprogramming 107

Item 28: Familiarize Yourself with Module and Class Hooks 107

Item 29: Invoke super from within Class Hooks 114

Item 30: Prefer define_method to method_missing 115

Item 31: Know the Difference between the Variants of eval 122

Item 32: Consider Alternatives to Monkey Patching 127

Item 33: Invoke Modified Methods with Alias Chaining 133

Item 34: Consider Supporting Differences in Proc Arity 136

Item 35: Think Carefully Before Using Module Prepending 141

 

Chapter 6: Testing 145

Item 36: Familiarize Yourself with MiniTest Unit Testing 145

Item 37: Familiarize Yourself with MiniTest Spec Testing 149

Item 38: Simulate Determinism with Mock Objects 152

Item 39: Strive for Effectively Tested Code 156

 

Chapter 7: Tools and Libraries 163

Item 40: Know How to Work with Ruby Documentation 163

Item 41: Be Aware of IRB’s Advanced Features 166

Item 42: Manage Gem Dependencies with Bundler 170

Item 43: Specify an Upper Bound for Gem Dependencies 175

 

Chapter 8: Memory Management and Performance 179

Item 44: Familiarize Yourself with Ruby’s Garbage Collector 179

Item 45: Create Resource Safety Nets with Finalizers 185

Item 46: Be Aware of Ruby Profiling Tools 189

Item 47: Avoid Object Literals in Loops 195

Item 48: Consider Memoizing Expensive Computations 197

 

Epilogue 201

 

Index 203

Author

Peter J. Jones is a freelance software developer and a senior instructor for programming workshops taught by Devalot.com. He has been programming in Ruby since 2005, and has written and taught several development workshops, including an 11-week Ruby class for beginners.

Reader Review(s)

“This book is quite unlike any other Ruby book, and in a couple hundred pages, I imagine anyone who reads this—novice or expert—will emerge a better Ruby programmer.”

—From the Foreword by Mitchell Hashimoto, founder and CEO of HashiCorp, creator of Vagrant