Practical Ruby for System Administration

Chapter 11. Testing and Documentation

In this brief chapter, we will take a look at the tools available and conventions employed in the Ruby world for keeping one's code in order. We'll kick off with a section devoted to rake. Understanding the mechanics of this task-oriented, make-like tool can really save you time in the long run—especially where common housekeeping tasks are concerned. From here we'll move on to a section on unit testing, where we'll look at some step-by-step examples and make the case that such testing is about as simple as it can be in Ruby. Finally, we'll cover the documentation idioms and the magic of rdoc.

The business of testing and documenting code is particularly important for system administration, not least because ...