Sams Teach Yourself Ruby in 21 Days

Organizing Organization

“Program organization” is a broad, even ambiguous term—and deliberately so.

Program organization has to do with the process of designing your program: figuring out exactly what you want it to do, what classes you need to create, and how they will work together as the program is executed. At the same time, the phrase “program organization” sounds as though it might also pertain to a much more nuts-and-bolts, mundane set of activities—such as deciding what to name your program files, where to store them on your disk, and how to get Ruby to find them.

As it turns out, the cerebral activity of designing a program and the housekeeping activity of managing program files are closely intertwined. Generally, you should begin with ...