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Polished Ruby Programming

You're reading from   Polished Ruby Programming Build better software with more intuitive, maintainable, scalable, and high-performance Ruby code

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Product type Paperback
Published in Jul 2021
Publisher Packt
ISBN-13 9781801072724
Length 434 pages
Edition 1st Edition
Languages
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Author (1):
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Jeremy Evans Jeremy Evans
Author Profile Icon Jeremy Evans
Jeremy Evans
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Table of Contents (23) Chapters Close

Preface 1. Section 1: Fundamental Ruby Programming Principles
2. Chapter 1: Getting the Most out of Core Classes FREE CHAPTER 3. Chapter 2: Designing Useful Custom Classes 4. Chapter 3: Proper Variable Usage 5. Chapter 4: Methods and Their Arguments 6. Chapter 5: Handling Errors 7. Chapter 6: Formatting Code for Easy Reading 8. Section 2: Ruby Library Programming Principles
9. Chapter 7: Designing Your Library 10. Chapter 8: Designing for Extensibility 11. Chapter 9: Metaprogramming and When to Use It 12. Chapter 10: Designing Useful Domain-Specific Languages 13. Chapter 11: Testing to Ensure Your Code Works 14. Chapter 12: Handling Change 15. Chapter 13: Using Common Design Patterns 16. Chapter 14: Optimizing Your Library 17. Section 3: Ruby Web Programming Principles
18. Chapter 15: The Database Is Key 19. Chapter 16: Web Application Design Principles 20. Chapter 17: Robust Web Application Security 21. Assessments 22. Other Books You May Enjoy

Learning the pros and cons of abstraction

Unlike in many other programming languages, metaprogramming in Ruby isn't that much different than regular programming. Many other programming languages implement metaprogramming with a preprocessor before compilation or a macro processor during compilation, and there are things you can do in the metaprogramming environment that you cannot do in the runtime environment and vice versa. Thankfully, Ruby has no such restrictions on its metaprogramming. You use the same syntax for metaprogramming that you use for regular programming, and you can do metaprogramming at any time.

The main difference between programming and metaprogramming in Ruby is conceptual. Conceptually in Ruby, metaprogramming operates at a higher realm of abstraction than regular programming. If regular programming in Ruby uses classes to create objects and modify the data in those objects, metaprogramming in Ruby creates new classes and modifies the methods in those...

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