Rails AntiPatterns: Best Practice Ruby on Rails Refactoring

01/18/2011 · No Responses

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. Rails™ 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

About the Author
Chad Pytel is the founder and CEO of thoughtbot, a software development firm specializing in Ruby on Rails, and creators of Paperclip, Shoulda, FactoryGirl, and Hoptoad, among other projects. thoughtbot embraces both agile development methodologies and a “getting real” project philosophy. Chad coauthored Pro Active Record: Databases with Ruby and Rails (Apress, 2007) and has presented at various conferences around the world. To follow along with Chad and the rest of the thoughtbot team’s ideas on development, design, technology, and business, visit their blog at http://robots.thoughtbot.com.

Tammer Saleh is the director of engineering at Engine Yard. He wrote the Shoulda testing framework, was the primary developer and project manager for thoughtbot’s fantastic Hoptoad service, and is an experienced Ruby on Rails trainer and speaker. In previous lives, he’s done AI development for the NCSA and the University of Illinois, as well as systems administration for both Citysearch.com and Caltech’s Earthquake Detection Network. You can find him online at http://tammersaleh.com.