Rails AntiPatterns: Best Practice Ruby on Rails Refactoring

Rails Anti-patterns shifts the focus beyond the basic mechanisms of the Rails framework, and instead explores Rails in terms of common problems a developer may encounter and the generally-accepted "Rails" solutions. While other intro to mid-level Rails books I’ve read touch on testing and walk through unit test or Rspec, they still failed to convey many complicated concepts behind testing in general. Rails Anti-Patterns answered a lot of the questions about testing I still had after reading others, such as how to model test data, or how to appropriately use mocks and stub methods. Ruby reaches far beyond Rails, and the author makes a point to explain how to test outside of the framework. Such a testing mentality will do wonders for the aspiring rubyist. The section on ruby models provided the most beneficial information about re-thinking how to write a rails app. You learn to refactor code duplication across multiple models into a module, and this practice works usefully to clarify the behavior of a large single model as well. The authors show how to refactor similar methods like traditional getters, setters and scopes using dynamic method definition and metaprogramming. The magic behind these patterns makes ruby a powerful tool, and the book It continues to emphasize the use of the scope method, and of refactoring unstructured, php-like code into Rails-esque data structures with separation into single-purpose methods and classes. It continually stresses the importance of maintaining the single responsibility principle, a very helpful rule that helps clarify and strengthen the code. Later they write strongly in favor of using the classic design pattern of factories instead of more brittle fixures. They introduce the wonderful Factory Girl and they explain how to get started writing factories with it. Finally, a well-deserved tirade against silent failures. Never let an exception slip through undetected. You always want to collect as much data as possible about your system, especially about failures, so fail loudly! Overall Rails Anti-Patterns not only contributed a lot to both my Rails knowledge but increased my passion for the ruby language along the way. This book will improve the way you approach code design and problem solving, I highly recommend it. For additional material on testing and patterns, the authors suggest “Simple Smalltalk Testing: with Patterns” by Kent Beck.