Practical Object-Oriented Design in Ruby: An Agile Primer (Addison-Wesley Professional Ruby)

Delightful, important, must-read for intermediate OO devs
In short, this is in my top five programming books I’ve ever read. Please do not hesitate, do everyone that works with your code (especially yourself) a favor and read it.I believe that in 20 years, this will be considered one of the definitive works on Object-Oriented Programming. The author provides a smooth on-ramp from basic OO programming principles, and builds on it until you’re able to understand the kinds of lessons that normally only come from decades of day-in, day-out experience working in OO code.What’s unusual about this book?- It reads your mind.The author takes enormous care to empathize with the reader. Many times, you’ll find yourself reading and thinking something, only to read “you’re probably thinking at this point…” with your exact thought or concern.- The author is okay with sounding like a human being.The author’s colloquial style peeks through over and over again. I kept getting caught off guard by delightful little turns of phrase that one does not see often in programming books.- The lessons are grounded in reality.Since Ms. Metz keeps the examples surprisingly close to production code (though a somewhat simplified version), you don’t have to reach very far to figure out how you’d apply these lessons. Examples aren’t contrived to prove a point, they are real-life situations that demand a solution, which always seems to be presented at just the right time. While reading, you’ll find yourself exclaiming when she pinpoints the exact source of pain that you run into frequently.- Sections end, rather than begin, with a principle.This is the first book about Object-Oriented design I’ve read that doesn’t clobber you over the head with jargon or come in with a top-down approach. Most technical books start with an assertion, pattern, or hypothesis, then spend the rest of the book explaining and trying to convince you. Ms. Metz takes the longer, more difficult approach of organically working through a typical Object-Oriented application, growing it, feeling pain, and addressing that pain. Along the way, she points out where these pain points are addressed, and only then does she explain that there is a name for the solution,- It is immediately beneficial.For my part, I couldn’t wait to go back and apply all the lessons I learned to code that I’d written that I wasn’t happy with and couldn’t figure out why. I’ve used the lessons from this book to help guide my intuition about the kind of code that lends itself to long-term maintainability.- It contains no religious zealotry.There’s no preachiness: it’s all about strategies, tactics, and tradeoffs a software developer employs to reach a desired goal. It also has the most concise and articulate overview of testing styles I’ve ever seen. Many programming books lose the forest for the trees, focusing on a pattern, principle, tool, or technique, touting it as *the* solution to all your programming problems. Ms. Metz never falls into that trap, and keeps the focus on writing code that can meet the changing needs of users for years to come.- It is timeless.Rather than a trendy new topic, this book could find itself applicable 25 years ago or 25 years from now. I believe it’ll be regarded as a landmark volume on the topic of OO design, along with books like Kent Beck’s Smalltalk Best Practice Patterns. It’s obvious that lots of care, attention, and refinement went into this book, and the reader benefits greatly. I’m grateful to Sandy for writing this book, I plan to re-read it at least once a year to keep my OO skills from falling into atrophy.I wish I could provide some negative feedback to balance the review, but I simply don’t have any. If you’re a relatively new, intermediate, or even somewhat advanced OO developer in any langauge, purchasing this book is the best way I know to level up your Object-Oriented design skills.

Superb book for Ruby and Object Oriented Programming
This is a well written book that explains Object Oriented principles clearly. I started this book without much Ruby experience and still was able to understand it.The main example used throughout the book is a bicycle represented as an object in Ruby. You start off with how to represent a bicycle, and then expand to other types of bikes, and other features the client wants. The example works well here with the author explaining how you might implement it, and then refactoring to implement it better.It is rare to see a book that flows as well as this one does. I was consistently surprised how clear the explanations were, and the writer is able to communicate as if they were explaining it to you in person. The author’s command of the language and depth of knowledge make this a joy to read.The pages of the book itself have a good feel, the examples are in color and include line numbers.

Great book by Sandy. Reads easily and teach you the core OOP techniques in a fashioned way!This book is a must! Also for non Ruby progammers.

While this book uses ruby as its syntax, principles are applicable to other languages as well. Full of points to cover design knowledge gaps.

Kurz zu mir: Ich habe fünf Jahre Erfahrung mit Ruby on Rails und noch einige Jahre mehr mit anderen Programmiersprachen und Frameworks.Dieses Buch war für mich ein Augenöffner. Es erklärt für mich sehr anschaulich und verständlich, wie man einfach, besseren Code schreiben kann.Viele Probleme und Schlagwörter sind einem natürlich ein Begriff gewesen. Dieses Buch aber schafft es, diese Begriffe wirklich mit mit Leben zu füllen.Ich kann dieses Buch für jeden Entwickler empfehlen. Nicht nur Ruby-Entwickler dürften davon profitieren. Die angesprochenen Themen sind relevant für alle OO-Progammiersprachen. Genauso die Lösungsmöglichkeiten.Am meisten dürfte sich dieses Buch jedoch für Entwickler eignen, die einige Erfahrung haben. Komplette Anfänger würden vermutlich oft mit dem Kopf nicken und ‘Ja genau’ sagen, aber nicht die Erfahrung haben, um das im Buch vermittelte Wissen wirklich zu verinnerlichen.Wer ein alter OOP Hase ist, der muss dieses Buch vermutlich nicht lesen, aber evtl. lernt auch ein alter Hase noch den einen oder anderen neuen Trick.