Polished Ruby Programming: Build better software with more intuitive, maintainable, scalable, and high-performance Ruby code

Evans

$19.99 per month

4.6 (14 Ratings)

Paperback Jul 2021 434 pages 1st Edition

Evans

$19.99 per month

4.6 (14 Ratings)

Paperback Jul 2021 434 pages 1st Edition

What do you get with a Packt Subscription?

Free for first 7 days. $19.99 p/m after that. Cancel any time!

Unlimited ad-free access to the largest independent learning library in tech. Access this title and thousands more!

50+ new titles added per month, including many first-to-market concepts and exclusive early access to books as they are being written.

Innovative learning tools, including AI book assistants, code context explainers, and text-to-speech.

Thousands of reference materials covering every tech concept you need to stay up to date.

Subscribe now

View plans & pricing

View table of contents

Preview Book

Download Code

Key benefits

Learn Ruby web application design principles and strategies for databases, security, and testing from a Ruby committer
Understand the design principles behind polished Ruby code and trade-offs between implementation approaches
Use metaprogramming and DSLs to reduce the amount of code needed without decreasing maintainability

Description

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.

Who is this book for?

This book is for Ruby programmers who are comfortable in coding with Ruby but want to advance their skills by mastering the deeper principles and best practices behind writing maintainable, scalable, optimized, and well-structured Ruby code. This book won’t teach you the basics of Ruby – you’ll need intermediate knowledge and practical experience before you can dive in.

What you will learn

Use Ruby s core classes and design custom classes effectively
Explore the principles behind variable usage and method argument choice
Implement advanced error handling approaches such as exponential backoff
Design extensible libraries and plugin systems in Ruby
Use metaprogramming and DSLs to avoid code redundancy
Implement different approaches to testing and understand their trade-offs
Discover design patterns, refactoring, and optimization with Ruby
Explore database design principles and advanced web app security

What do you get with a Packt Subscription?

Free for first 7 days. $19.99 p/m after that. Cancel any time!

Unlimited ad-free access to the largest independent learning library in tech. Access this title and thousands more!

50+ new titles added per month, including many first-to-market concepts and exclusive early access to books as they are being written.

Innovative learning tools, including AI book assistants, code context explainers, and text-to-speech.

Thousands of reference materials covering every tech concept you need to stay up to date.

Subscribe now

View plans & pricing

Frequently bought together

$54.99

$43.99

Layered Design for Ruby on Rails Applications

$49.99

Total $ 148.97

Filter reviews by

All

Packt verified reviews

Amazon verified reviews

John Jun 22, 2024

Clear and well-written! An excellent book!

Subscriber review

k0kubun Jul 09, 2021

What I Like:This book is something that only the author can write. He talks about why the libraries he authored such as Roda and Sequel are better than Rails, which I enjoyed reading the most. With his knowledge as a very active Ruby committer, he also talks about Ruby 3 keyword arguments and mentions features that might get into Ruby in the future.This book discusses principles and trade-offs for a wide range of topics, not just Ruby-specific techniques. The ideas in this book would be useful even when you’re not writing Ruby, especially when it comes to web applications.What I Don’t Like:While there are many exciting contents in this book, as a Ruby developer with 8 years of experience in production web applications, Ruby core, and gems, I already knew many of the ideas and trade-offs that are written in this book prior to reading it. The whole book would be helpful for pushing intermediate Ruby programmers to advanced ones, but if you’re already an advanced Ruby programmer, it might take some time to find interesting ideas out of the chapters that talk about principles you have already thought about.

Amazon Verified review

Christopher Haupt Jul 12, 2021

This book is a pretty useful distillation of core Ruby facts and techniques that are important to understand if you are moving from being able to "do things in Ruby" to being able to "do things efficiently and performantly in Ruby".Having participated in Ruby meetups/talks in which Jeremy presented, this book is the "async" version of that.Up to date for Ruby 3.x, the book moves through several parts, reinforcing your knowledge of the basics of the core language first, then moving on to extensibility (building libraries, metaprogramming, DSLs), before ending with the third section in the place where Ruby really became much more mainstream--web development.I found the examples to be pretty easy to understand, building up from the basics in small easy to consume pieces. There isn't a lot of filler code in here, instead focused examples with demonstrations of how things work. You can imagine Jeremy demoing these ideas to you as if you were in a virtual pairing session together. I appreciated that approachable style.If you are completed new to Ruby, this book may be a bit of a challenge. The book does indicate this is for intermediate+ readers. You may want to look at some introductory material first to ascertain you are comfortable with the base language and its flexibility. If you are an advanced Rubyist, I suspect you'll still get something out of this text, even if just confirming your core understanding and seeing how things work in the latest version of Ruby.

Peter Cooper Jul 19, 2021

This is an interesting book that covers what feels like fresh ground for a Ruby book, but is well trodden ground for Ruby blog posts: best practices and opinions on how to design things like classes and libraries.Some of the examples are a little artificial (no doubt due to needing to fit a lot into one 400 page book) and I don't agree wholeheartedly with every single suggestion, but broadly this is a good set of recommendations and approaches to producing better Ruby code.The book claims to be targeted at intermediate to advanced Ruby developers, but I think it's better targeted at beginners to high intermediates and would be slightly less useful to advanced Rubyists already be familiar with most of the best practices covered.I'd recommend this book to anyone who hasn't trawled through the Ruby blogosphere picking up tidbits of Ruby best practices over the years and would instead like to get a heavy dose of it in a single book.

A. J. Firmin Aug 23, 2022

We use Chef at work so learning Ruby was going to be a necessity.It looks to be an excellent book but my boss told me to learn Python so had to return this after one day.

Polished Ruby Programming: Build better software with more intuitive, maintainable, scalable, and high-performance Ruby code

What do you get with a Packt Subscription?