Jean Tessier’s Reviews > Eloquent Ruby, Second Edition > Status Update

Compose Method and keeping methods short. I was surprised they didn't mention end-less methods, which were introduced earlier. While they showed an example with guard clauses, they didn't mention this pattern either.

Testing with Minitest and/or RSpec. Test first or test last. The examples are too trivial to show the power of each framework, but I guess that is not the goal of the book. It could have used a quick overview of how to organize specs (though that's contentious). I liked the very strong emphasis on writing tests, even if they are not comprehensive. Something is better than nothing. But what about the friction?

Everything is an object, we know. :-)

The part on arrays and hashes was as expected. The chapter on pattern matching was a real eye opener. There is an interesting comparison to regexes: match a form and pull some bits out.

Symbols, as opposed to strings. Strings represent data and have many methods for their manipulation and transformation. Symbols represent concepts and the only thing they really need is comparison. It makes no sense to take a substring of a symbol; that would be another, different symbol.

Regular expressions. I didn't know that ^ matches the beginning of any line in multiline strings (with the m suffix), and that $ matches the end of any line. I didn't know about the x suffix to insert spaces, newlines, and comments in regular expressions either.

Strings. The author recommends using double quotes most of the time. I have been using double quotes only when I need interpolation. Am I doing a bad?

Ruby's control structure discourage the use of the NOT operator. They try to keep things simple for humans to read and understand.

Syntax is not enough. Language communities adopt a common style over time. Basic formatting has broad rules, with guidelines on when to break them.