Ruby Best Practices

Foreword
Preface

1 Driving Code Through Tests
-A Quick Note on Testing Frameworks
-Designing for Testability
-Testing Fundamentals
-Advanced Testing Techniques
-Keeping Things Organized
-Conclusions

2 Designing Beautiful APIs
-Designing for Convenience: Ruport's Table(?) feature
-Ruby's Secret Power: Flexible Argument Processing
-Ruby's Other Secret Power: Code Blocks
-Avoiding Surprises
-Conclusions

3 Mastering the Dynamic Toolkit
-BlankSlate: A BasicObject on Steroids
-Building Flexible Interfaces
-Implementing Per-Object Behavior
-Extending and Modifying Preexisting Code
-Building Classes and Modules Programmatically
-Registering Hooks and Callbacks
-Conclusions

4 Text Processing and File Management
-Line-Based File Processing with State Tracking
-Regular Expressions
-Working with Files
-The tempfile Standard Library
-Text-Processing Strategies
-Conclusions

5 Functional Programming Techniques
-Laziness Can Be a Virtue (A Look at lazy.rb)
-Minimizing Mutable State and Reducing Side Effects
-Modular Code Organization
-Memoization
-Infinite Lists
-Higher-Order Procedures
-Conclusions

6 When Things Go Wrong
-A Process for Debugging Ruby Code
-Capturing the Essence of a Defect
-Scrutinizing Your Code
-Working with Logger
-Conclusions

7 Reducing Cultural Barriers
-m17n by Example: A Look at Ruby's CSV Standard Library
-Portable m17n Through UTF-8 Transcoding
-m17n in Standalone Scripts
-m17n-Safe Low-Level Text Processing
-Localizing Your Code
-Conclusions

8 Skillful Project Maintenance
-Exploring a Well-Organized Ruby Project (Haml)
-Conventions to Know About
-API Documentation via RDoc
-The RubyGems Package Manager
-Rake: Ruby's Built-in Build Utility
-Conclusions

Appendix A: Writing Backward-Compatible Code
-Avoiding a Mess
-Nonportable Features in Ruby 1.9
-Workarounds for Common Issues
-Conclusions

Appendix B: 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

Appendix C: Ruby Worst Practices
-Not-So-Intelligent Design
-The Downside of Cleverness
-Conclusions

Index