Eloquent Ruby

Chapter 10. Construct Your Classes from Short, Focused Methods

Let’s face it: Despite shelves full of books on software architecture, enough UML diagrams to fill an art museum, and design meetings that seem to last longer than the pyramids, building software mostly comes down to writing one method after another.

An important, but frequently ignored question is, how exactly should we break our classes up into those methods? Although the question of “How should I write my methods?” is not really one that a programming language can answer, programming languages do tend to encourage one style over another. In this chapter we are going to look at how Ruby programmers tend to write methods. We will see that most Ruby programmers favor very short methods, ...