Ruby Best Practices

About This Book

This book is designed to be read by chapter, but the chapters are not in any particular order. The book is split into two parts, with eight chapters forming its core and three appendixes included as supplementary material. Despite the fact that you can read these topics in any order that you’d like, it is recommended that you read the entire book. Lots of the topics play off of each other, and reading through them all will give you a solid base in some powerful Ruby techniques and practices.

Each of the core chapters starts off with a case study that is meant to serve as an introduction to the topic it covers. Every case study is based on code from real Ruby projects, and is meant to provide a practical experience in code reading and exploration. The best way to work through these examples is to imagine that you are working through a foreign codebase with a fellow developer, discussing the interesting bits as you come across them. In this way, you’ll be able to highlight the exciting parts without getting bogged down on every last detail. You are not expected to understand every line of code in the case studies in this book, but instead should just treat them as useful exercises that prepare you for studying the underlying topics.

Once you’ve worked your way through the case study, the remainder of each core chapter fills in details on specific subtopics related to the overall theme. These tend to mix real code in with some abstract examples, preferring the former ...