Brown - Ruby Best Practices

This book isnt really written with the Ruby beginner in mind, and certainly wont be very useful to someone brand new to programming. Instead, I assume a decent technical grasp of the Ruby language and at least some practical experience in developing software with it. However, you neednt be some guru in order to benefit from this book. The most important thing is that you actually care about improving the way you write Ruby code.

As long as you have at least an intermediate level of experience, reading through the book should be enjoyable. Youll want to have your favorite reference book handy to look things up as needed. Either The Ruby Programming Language by David Flanagan and Yukihiro Matsumoto (OReilly) or Programming Ruby , Third Edition, by Dave Thomas (Pragmatic Bookshelf) should do the trick.

It is also important to note that this is a Ruby 1.9 book. It makes no attempt to provide notes on the differences between Ruby 1.8 and 1.9 except for in a brief appendix designed specifically for that purpose. Although many of the code samples will likely work with little or no modifications for earlier versions of Ruby, Ruby 1.9 is the way forward, and I have chosen to focus on it exclusively in this book. Although the book may still be useful to those maintaining legacy code, it is admittedly geared more toward the forward-looking crowd.

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 youd 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, youll 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.