Ruby Best Practices

by Brown, Gregory

• ISBN13: 9780596523008
• ISBN10: 0596523009
• Edition: 1st
• Format: Paperback
• Copyright: 2009-06-25
• Publisher: Oreilly & Associates Inc

Summary

With this concise book, Ruby programmers learn how to design beautiful APIs and domain-specific languages, write code that's readable and expressive, and work with functional programming ideas and techniques that can simplify code and make them more productive.

Author Biography

Gregory T. Brown is a New Haven, CT based Rubyist who spends most of his time on free software projects in Ruby. His main projects are Prawn and Ruport, and he is also the author of the upcoming book Ruby Best Practices. He also is in possession of a small bamboo plant that seems to be invincible, and he is quite proud of this accomplishment.

Table of Contents

Foreword	p. ix
Preface	p. xi
Driving Code Through Tests	p. 1
A Quick Note on Testing Frameworks	p. 2
Designing for Testability	p. 2
Testing Fundamentals	p. 10
Well-Focused Examples	p. 10
Testing Exceptions	p. 11
Run the Whole Suite at Once	p. 13
Advanced Testing Techniques	p. 14
Using Mocks and Stubs	p. 14
Testing Complex Output	p. 22
Keeping Things Organized	p. 26
Embedding Tests in Library Files	p. 27
Test Helpers	p. 27
Custom Assertions	p. 29
Conclusions	p. 30
Designing Beautiful APIs	p. 31
Designing for Convenience: Ruport's Table() feature	p. 31
Ruby's Secret Power: Flexible Argument Processing	p. 35
Standard Ordinal Arguments	p. 36
Ordinal Arguments with Optional Parameters	p. 36
Pseudo-Keyword Arguments	p. 37
Treating Arguments As an Array	p. 38
Ruby's Other Secret Power: Code Blocks	p. 40
Working with Enumerable	p. 41
Using Blocks to Abstract Pre- and Postprocessing	p. 43
Blocks As Dynamic Callbacks	p. 45
Blocks for Interface Simplification	p. 47
Avoiding Surprises	p. 48
Use attr_reader, attr_writer, and attr_accessor	p. 48
Understand What method? and method! Mean	p. 50
Make Use of Custom Operators	p. 53
Conclusions	p. 55
Mastering the Dynamic Toolkit	p. 57
BlankSlate: A BasicObject on Steroids	p. 57
Building Flexible Interfaces	p. 62
Making instance_eval() Optional	p. 63
Handling Messages with method_missing() and send()	p. 65
Dual-Purpose Accessors	p. 69
Implementing Per-Object Behavior	p. 70
Extending and Modifying Preexisting Code	p. 74
Adding New Functionality	p. 75
Modification via Aliasing	p. 79
Per-Object Modification	p. 81
Building Classes and Modules Programmatically	p. 84
Registering Hooks and Callbacks	p. 88
Detecting Newly Added Functionality	p. 89
Tracking Inheritance	p. 91
Tracking Mixins	p. 93
Conclusions	p. 96
Text Processing and File Management	p. 99
Line-Based File Processing with State Tracking	p. 99
Regular Expressions	p. 103
Don't Work Too Hard	p. 105
Anchors Are Your Friends	p. 105
Use Caution When Working with Quantifiers	p. 106
Working with Files	p. 109
Using Pathname and FileUtils	p. 109
The tempfile Standard Library	p. 112
Automatic Temporary Directory Handling	p. 113
Collision Avoidance	p. 113
Same Old I/O Operations	p. 114
Automatic Unlinking	p. 114
Text-Processing Strategies	p. 115
Advanced Line Processing	p. 116
Atomic Saves	p. 118
Conclusions	p. 120
Functional Programming Techniques	p. 121
Laziness Can Be a Virtue (A Look at lazy.rb)	p. 121
Minimizing Mutable State and Reducing Side Effects	p. 129
Modular Code Organization	p. 133
Memoization	p. 138
Infinite Lists	p. 145
Higher-Order Procedures	p. 149
Conclusions	p. 152
When Things Go Wrong	p. 153
A Process for Debugging Ruby Code	p. 153
Capturing the Essence of a Defect	p. 157
Scrutinizing Your Code	p. 160
Utilizing Reflection	p. 160
Improving inspect Output	p. 162
Finding Needles in a Haystack	p. 166
Working with Logger	p. 168
Conclusions	p. 176
Reducing Cultural Barriers	p. 177
m17n by Example: A Look at Ruby's CSV Standard Library	p. 178
Portable m17n Through UTF-8 Transcoding	p. 182
Source Encodings	p. 183
Working with Files	p. 183
Transcoding User Input in an Organized Fashion	p. 185
m17n in Standalone Scripts	p. 188
Inferring Encodings from Locale	p. 189
Customizing Encoding Defaults	p. 191
m17n-Safe Low-Level Text Processing	p. 193
Localizing Your Code	p. 195
Conclusions	p. 204
Skillful Project Maintenance	p. 205
Exploring a Well-Organized Ruby Project (Haml)	p. 205
Conventions to Know About	p. 210
What Goes in a README	p. 211
Laying Out Your Library	p. 213
Executables	p. 216
Tests	p. 216
Examples	p. 217
API Documentation via RDoc	p. 219
Basic Documentation Techniques and Guidelines	p. 220
Controlling Output with RDoc Directives	p. 222
The RubyGems Package Manager	p. 227
Writing a Gem::Specification	p. 228
Working with Dependencies	p. 231
Rake: Ruby's Built-in Build Utility	p. 234
Conclusions	p. 237
Writing Backward-Compatible Code	p. 239
Leveraging Ruby's Standard Library	p. 251
Ruby Worst Practices	p. 283
Index	p. 299
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