Foreword ix
Preface xi
1 Driving Code Through Tests 1
A Quick Note on Testing Frameworks 2
Designing for Testability 2
Testing Fundamentals 10
Well-Focused Examples 10
Testing Exceptions 11
Run the Whole Suite at Once 13
Advanced Testing Techniques 14
Using Mocks and Stubs 14
Testing Complex Output 22
Keeping Things Organized 26
Embedding Tests in Library Files 27
Test Helpers 27
Custom Assertions 29
Conclusions 30
2 Designing Beautiful APIs 31
Designing for Convenience: Ruport's Table() feature 31
Ruby's Secret Power: Flexible Argument Processing 35
Standard Ordinal Arguments 36
Ordinal Arguments with Optional Parameters 36
Pseudo-Keyword Arguments 37
Treating Arguments As an Array 38
Ruby's Other Secret Power: Code Blocks 40
Working with Enumerable 41
Using Blocks to Abstract Pre- and Postprocessing 43
Blocks As Dynamic Callbacks 45
Blocks for Interface Simplification 47
Avoiding Surprises 48
Use attr_reader, attr_writer, and attr_accessor 48
Understand What method? and method! Mean 50
Make Use of Custom Operators 53
Conclusions 55
3 Mastering the Dynamic Toolkit 57
BlankSlate: A BasicObject on Steroids 57
Building Flexible Interfaces 62
Making instance_eval() Optional 63
Handling Messages with method_missing() and send() 65
Dual-Purpose Accessors 69
Implementing Per-Object Behavior 70
Extending and Modifying Preexisting Code 74
Adding New Functionality 75
Modification via Aliasing 79
Per-Object Modification 81
Building Classes and Modules Programmatically 84
Registering Hooks and Callbacks 88
Detecting Newly Added Functionality 89
Tracking Inheritance 91
Tracking Mixins93
Conclusions 96
4 Text Processing and File Management 99
Line-Based File Processing with State Tracking 99
Regular Expressions 103
Don't Work Too Hard 105
Anchors Are Your Friends 105
Use Caution When Working with Quantifiers 106
Working with Files 109
Using Pathname and FileUtils 109
The tempfile Standard Library 112
Automatic Temporary Directory Handling 113
Collision Avoidance 113
Same Old I/O Operations 114
Automatic Unlinking 114
Text-Processing Strategies 115
Advanced Line Processing 116
Atomic Saves 118
Conclusions 120
5 Functional Programming Techniques 121
Laziness Can Be a Virtue (A Look at lazy.rb) 121
Minimizing Mutable State and Reducing Side Effects 129
Modular Code Organization 133
Memoization 138
Infinite Lists 145
Higher-Order Procedures 149
Conclusions 152
6 When Things Go Wrong 153
A Process for Debugging Ruby Code 153
Capturing the Essence of a Defect 157
Scrutinizing Your Code 160
Utilizing Reflection 160
Improving inspect Output 162
Finding Needles in a Haystack 166
Working with Logger 168
Conclusions 176
7 Reducing Cultural Barriers 177
m17n by Example: A Look at Ruby's CSV Standard Library 178
Portable m17n Through UTF-8 Transcoding 182
Source Encodings 183
Working with Files 183
Transcoding User Input in an Organized Fashion 185
m17n in Standalone Scripts 188
Inferring Encodings from Locale 189
Customizing Encoding Defaults 191
m17n-Safe Low-Level Text Processing 193
Localizing Your Code 195
Conclusions 204
8 Skillful Project Maintenance 205
Exploring a Well-Organized Ruby Project (Haml) 205
Conventions to Know About 210
What Goes in a README 211
Laying Out Your Library 213
Executables 216
Tests 216
Examples 217
API Documentation via RDoc 219
Basic Documentation Techniques and Guidelines 220
Controlling Output with RDoc Directives 222
The RubyGems Package Manager 227
Writing a Gem::Specification 228
Working with Dependencies 231
Rake: Ruby's Built-in Build Utility 234
Conclusions 237
A Writing Backward-Compatible Code 239
B Leveraging Ruby's Standard Library 251
C Ruby Worst Practices 283
Index 299
loading...