Paolo Perrotta has fifteen years of experience as a developer, ranging from embedded to enterprise software, computer games, and web applications. Paolo lives a nomadic life, mentoring agile teams throughout Europe. He has a base camp in Bologna, Italy. He loves Ruby.

It’s easy to write correct Ruby code, but to gain the fluency needed to write great Ruby code, you must go beyond syntax and absorb the “Ruby way” of thinking and problem solving. In Eloquent Ruby, Russ Olsen helps you write Ruby like true Rubyists do–so you can leverage its immense, surprising power. Olsen draws on years of experience internalizing the Ruby culture and teaching Ruby to other programmers. He guides you to the “Ah Ha!” moments when it suddenly becomes clear why Ruby works the way it does, and how you can take advantage of this language’s elegance and expressiveness. Eloquent Ruby starts small, answering tactical questions focused on a single statement, method, test, or bug. You’ll learn how to write code that actually looks like Ruby (not Java or C#); why Ruby has so many control structures; how to use strings, expressions, and symbols; and what dynamic typing is really good for. Next, the book addresses bigger questions related to building methods and classes. You’ll discover why Ruby classes contain so many tiny methods, when to use operator overloading, and when to avoid it. Olsen explains how to write Ruby code that writes its own code–and why you’ll want to. He concludes with powerful project-level features and techniques ranging from gems to Domain Specific Languages. A part of the renowned Addison-Wesley Professional Ruby Series, Eloquent Ruby will help you “put on your Ruby-colored glasses” and get results that make you a true believer.

Elevate your Ruby skills to an advanced level by deepening your understanding of the design principles, best practices, and trade-offs involved in implementation approaches to future-proof your Ruby applications Key FeaturesLearn Ruby web application design principles and strategies for databases, security, and testing from a Ruby committer Understand the design principles behind polished Ruby code and trade-offs between implementation approachesUse metaprogramming and DSLs to reduce the amount of code needed without decreasing maintainabilityBook Description Anyone striving to become an expert Ruby programmer needs to be able to write maintainable applications. Polished Ruby Programming will help you get better at designing scalable and robust Ruby programs, so that no matter how big the codebase grows, maintaining it will be a breeze. This book takes you on a journey through implementation approaches for many common programming situations, the trade-offs inherent in each approach, and why you may choose to use different approaches in different situations. You'll start by refreshing Ruby fundamentals, such as correctly using core classes, class and method design, variable usage, error handling, and code formatting. Then you'll move on to higher-level programming principles, such as library design, use of metaprogramming and domain-specific languages, and refactoring. Finally, you'll learn principles specific to web application development, such as how to choose a database and web framework, and how to use advanced security features. By the end of this Ruby programming book, you'll be a well rounded web developer with a deep understanding of Ruby. While most code examples and principles discussed in the book apply to all Ruby versions, some examples and principles are specific to Ruby 3.0, the latest release at the time of publication. What you will learnUse Ruby's core classes and design custom classes effectivelyExplore the principles behind variable usage and method argument choiceImplement advanced error handling approaches such as exponential backoffDesign extensible libraries and plugin systems in RubyUse metaprogramming and DSLs to avoid code redundancyImplement different approaches to testing and understand their trade-offsDiscover design patterns, refactoring, and optimization with RubyExplore database design principles and advanced web app securityWho this book is for This book is for Ruby programmers who are comfortable in coding with Ruby but want to advance their skills by mastering the deeper principles and best practices behind writing maintainable, scalable, optimized, and well-structured Ruby code. This book won't teach you the basics of Ruby – you'll need intermediate knowledge and practical experience before you can dive in.

You don't have to accept slow Ruby or Rails performance. In this comprehensive guide to Ruby optimization, you'll learn how to write faster Ruby code--but that's just the beginning. See exactly what makes Ruby and Rails code slow, and how to fix it. Alex Dymo will guide you through perils of memory and CPU optimization, profiling, measuring, performance testing, garbage collection, and tuning. You'll find that all those "hard" things aren't so difficult after all, and your code will run orders of magnitude faster. This is the first book ever that consolidates all the Ruby performance optimization advice in one place. It's your comprehensive guide to memory optimization, CPU optimization, garbage collector tuning, profiling, measurements, performance testing, and more. You'll go from performance rookie to expert. First, you'll learn the best practices for writing Ruby code that's easy not only on the CPU, but also on memory, and that doesn't trigger the dreaded garbage collector. You'll find out that garbage collection accounts for 80% of slowdowns, and often takes more than 50% of your program's execution time. And you'll discover the bottlenecks in Rails code and learn how selective attribute loading and preloading can mitigate the performance costs of ActiveRecord. As you advance to Ruby performance expert, you'll learn how profile your code, how to make sense out of profiler reports, and how to make optimization decisions based on them. You'll make sure slow code doesn't creep back into your Ruby application by writing performance tests, and you'll learn the right way to benchmark Ruby. And finally, you'll dive into the Ruby interpreter internals to really understand why garbage collection makes Ruby so slow, and how you can tune it up. What You Need: Some version of Ruby. The advice from this book applies to all modern Ruby versions from 1.9 to 2.2. 80% of the material will also be useful for legacy Ruby 1.8 users, and there is 1.8-specific advice as well.

This book will provide you with all of the tools you need to be a professional Ruby developer. Starting with the core principles, such as syntax and best practices, and up to advanced topics like metaprogramming and big data analysis. About This Book Provides the core skills required to become a Ruby programmer Covers how to use the most popular Ruby Gem libraries Includes details on regular expressions Who This Book Is For This is a complete course written from the ground up for beginners wanting to gain a solid understanding of the Ruby language. It starts at the beginning with how to install Ruby and work with it on multiple machines, so simply have a computer that's connected to the Internet and you'll be ready. What You Will Learn Learn how to use Ruby code effectively, picking the right tool for the job and not duplicating built-in functionality Gain best software development practices, and how to identify and fix common errors Absorb core programming skills, such as variables, strings, loops, conditionals, and much more Explore object-oriented programming and learn to create modular, reusable code that you can use across projects Build 10 practical Ruby programs as you work through the book on topics such as big data analysis and solving Euler equations In Detail Ruby is a powerful, general-purpose programming language that can be applied to any task. Whether you are an experienced developer who wants to learn a new language or you are new to programming, this book is your comprehensive Ruby coding guide. Starting with the foundational principles, such as syntax, and scaling up to advanced topics such as big data analysis, this book will give you all of the tools you need to be a professional Ruby developer. A few of the key topics are: object-oriented programming, built-in Ruby methods, core programming skills, and an introduction to the Ruby on Rails and Sinatra web frameworks. You will also build 10 practical Ruby programs. Created by an experienced Ruby developer, this book has been written to ensure it focuses on the skills you will need to be a professional Ruby developer. After you have read this book, you will be ready to start building real-world Ruby projects. Style and approach This is a comprehensive course for learning the Ruby programming language that works methodically through everything that you need to know. It begins with the basics of the language and then works through some complete projects to apply your skills and ensure that you have fully absorbed them and can use them in the real world.

The Complete Guide to Avoiding and Fixing Common Rails 3 Code and Design Problems As developers worldwide have adopted the powerful Ruby on Rails web framework, many have fallen victim to common mistakes that reduce code quality, performance, reliability, stability, scalability, and maintainability. RailsTM AntiPatterns identifies these widespread Rails code and design problems, explains why they’re bad and why they happen—and shows exactly what to do instead. The book is organized into concise, modular chapters—each outlines a single common AntiPattern and offers detailed, cookbook-style code solutions that were previously difficult or impossible to find. Leading Rails developers Chad Pytel and Tammer Saleh also offer specific guidance for refactoring existing bad code or design to reflect sound object-oriented principles and established Rails best practices. With their help, developers, architects, and testers can dramatically improve new and existing applications, avoid future problems, and establish superior Rails coding standards throughout their organizations. This book will help you understand, avoid, and solve problems with Model layer code, from general object-oriented programming violations to complex SQL and excessive redundancy Domain modeling, including schema and database issues such as normalization and serialization View layer tools and conventions Controller-layer code, including RESTful code Service-related APIs, including timeouts, exceptions, backgrounding, and response codes Third-party code, including plug-ins and gems Testing, from test suites to test-driven development processes Scaling and deployment Database issues, including migrations and validations System design for “graceful degradation” in the real world

Summary: Ruby 1.9 was a major release of the language: it introduced multinationalization, new block syntax and scoping rules, a new, faster, virtual machine, and hundreds of new methods in dozens of new classes and modules. Ruby 2.0 is less radical--it has keyword arguments, a new regexp engine, and some library changes. This book describes it all. The first quarter of the book is a tutorial introduction that gets you up to speed with the Ruby language and the most important classes and libraries. Download and play with the hundreds of code samples as your experiment with the language. The second section looks at real-world Ruby, covering the Ruby environment, how to package, document, and distribute code, and how to work with encodings. The third part of the book is more advanced. In it, you'll find a full description of the language, an explanation of duck typing, and a detailed description of the Ruby object model and metaprogramming. The book ends with a reference section: comprehensive and detailed documentation of Ruby's libraries. You'll find descriptions and examples of more than 1,300 methods in 58 built-in classes and modules, along with brief descriptions of 97 standard libraries. Ruby makes your programming more productive; it makes coding fun again. And this book will get you up to speed with the very latest Ruby, quickly and enjoyably.