Ruby Best Practices

Acknowledgments

Over the course of writing Ruby Best Practices, I was thoroughly supported by my friends, family, and fellow hackers. I want to thank each and every one of the folks who’ve helped out with this book, because it would not exist without them.

This book did not have a typical technical review process, but instead was supported by an excellent advisory board whose members participated in group discussion and the occasional review as each chapter was released. These folks not only helped catch technical errors, but helped me sketch out the overall vision for how the book should come together as well. Participants included James Britt, Francis Hwang, Hart Larew, Chris Lee, Jeremy McAnally, and Aaron Patterson.

Rounding out the group was the best pair of guiding mentors I could hope for, Brad Ediger and James Edward Gray II. Both have published Ruby books, and have worked with me extensively on a number of Ruby projects. James and Brad were both instrumental in producing this book, and to my career as a software developer in general. I have learned a ton from each of them, and thanks to their help with RBP, I can now pass their knowledge on to you.

Much of the source code in this book comes from the open source Ruby community. Although I talk about my own projects (Prawn and Ruport) a lot, most of the code I show is actually from other contributors or at least originated from good ideas that came up in mailing list discussions, feature requests, and so on. In addition to these ...