Refactoring in Ruby

Chapter 1. A Refactoring Example

Rather than start with a lot of explanation, we’ll begin with a quick example of refactoring to show how you can identify problems in code and systematically clean them up. We’ll work “at speed” so you can get the feel of a real session. In later chapters, we’ll touch on theory, provide deeper dives into problems and how you fix them, and explore moderately large examples that you can practice on.

Sparkline Script

Let’s take a look at a little Ruby script Kevin wrote a while back. The script generates a sparkline (a small graph used to display trends, without detail) and does it by generating an SVG document to describe the graphic. (See Figure 1.1.)

Figure 1.1. A sparkline

The original script was written ...