Ruby Best Practices

Foreword; Preface; Audience; About This Book; Conventions Used in This Book; Using Code Examples; Safari?? Books Online; How to Contact Us; Acknowledgments; Chapter 1: Driving Code Through Tests; 1.1 A Quick Note on Testing Frameworks; 1.2 Designing for Testability; 1.3 Testing Fundamentals; 1.4 Advanced Testing Techniques; 1.5 Keeping Things Organized; 1.6 Conclusions; Chapter 2: Designing Beautiful APIs; 2.1 Designing for Convenience: Ruport???s Table(?) feature; 2.2 Ruby???s Secret Power: Flexible Argument Processing; 2.3 Ruby???s Other Secret Power: Code Blocks; 2.4 Avoiding Surprises; 2.5 Conclusions; Chapter 3: Mastering the Dynamic Toolkit; 3.1 BlankSlate: A BasicObject on Steroids; 3.2 Building Flexible Interfaces; 3.3 Implementing Per-Object Behavior; 3.4 Extending and Modifying Preexisting Code; 3.5 Building Classes and Modules Programmatically; 3.6 Registering Hooks and Callbacks; 3.7 Conclusions; Chapter 4: Text Processing and File Management; 4.1 Line-Based File Processing with State Tracking; 4.2 Regular Expressions; 4.3 Working with Files; 4.4 The tempfile Standard Library; 4.5 Text-Processing Strategies; 4.6 Conclusions; Chapter 5: Functional Programming Techniques; 5.1 Laziness Can Be a Virtue (A Look at lazy.rb); 5.2 Minimizing Mutable State and Reducing Side Effects; 5.3 Modular Code Organization; 5.4 Memoization; 5.5 Infinite Lists; 5.6 Higher-Order Procedures; 5.7 Conclusions; Chapter 6: When Things Go Wrong; 6.1 A Process for Debugging Ruby Code; 6.2 Capturing the Essence of a Defect; 6.3 Scrutinizing Your Code; 6.4 Working with Logger; 6.5 Conclusions; Chapter 7: Reducing Cultural Barriers; 7.1 m17n by Example: A Look at Ruby???s CSV Standard Library; 7.2 Portable m17n Through UTF-8 Transcoding; 7.3 m17n in Standalone Scripts; 7.4 m17n-Safe Low-Level Text Processing; 7.5 Localizing Your Code; 7.6 Conclusions; Chapter 8: Skillful Project Maintenance; 8.1 Exploring a Well-Organized Ruby Project (Haml); 8.2 Conventions to Know About; 8.3 API Documentation via RDoc; 8.4 The RubyGems Package Manager; 8.5 Rake: Ruby???s Built-in Build Utility; 8.6 Conclusions; Writing Backward-Compatible Code; Avoiding a Mess; Nonportable Features in Ruby 1.9; Workarounds for Common Issues; Conclusions; Leveraging Ruby???s Standard Library; Why Do We Need a Standard Library?; Pretty-Printer for Ruby Objects (pp); Working with HTTP and FTP (open-uri); Working with Dates and Times (date); Lexical Parsing with Regular Expressions (strscan); Cryptographic Hash Functions (digest); Mathematical Ruby Scripts (mathn); Working with Tabular Data (csv); Transactional Filesystem-Based Data Storage (pstore); Human-Readable Data Serialization (json); Embedded Ruby for Code Generation (erb); Conclusions; Ruby Worst Practices; Not-So-Intelligent Design; The Downside of Cleverness; Conclusions; Colophon;