The Rails™ 3 Way, Second Edition

Chapter 19. Extending Rails with Plugins

Once again, when we come to the creation of things by people, the form this unfolding takes, always, is step by step to please yourself. We cannot perform the unfolding process without knowing how to please ourselves.

—Christopher Alexander

I doubt that many of us would still be programmers if we had to solve exactly the same problems repeatedly, day after day. Instead, we are always looking for ways to reapply existing solutions to the problems we encounter. Your code represents the abstract solution to a problem, and so you are often striving to either reuse this abstraction (albeit in slightly different contexts), or refine your solution so that it can be reused. Through reuse, you can save time, ...