What's this about?
Confident Ruby is, first and foremost, a book about joy. It’s about the joy I found when I first discovered how elegantly and succinctly I could state problems in Ruby code. It’s about the joy I gradually lost as the “real world” snuck in and cluttered my code with distracting edge case scenarios, error handling, and checks for nil. And it’s about how I came to recapture that joy, by employing small patterns and stylistic choices to make each method tell a coherent story.
The structure of the book is that of a patterns catalog. But these are not large, heavy-weight architectural patterns. These patterns are small, most of them taking place at the level of an individual method or even a single line of code. They are related by a single organizing principle: removing the uncertainty that leads to code constantly second-guessing itself; and replacing it with a confident, clear focus on the task at hand.
You'll Learn
Author
Avdi Grimm
I’ve been a professional developer for over twenty years. Over the course of my career I’ve worked on everything from aerospace embedded systems to enterprise web applications. I’m a consulting pair-programmer, the author of several popular Ruby programming books, and a recipient of the Ruby Hero award for service to the Ruby community. Since I’ve been been helping developers deepen their coding practice at Graceful.Dev (formerly RubyTapas.com).
I specialize in taking what I learn, synthesizing it, and sharing it in forms that are helpful to the team, the organization, and to the global community of developers. I’m particularly interested in building graceful systems: rich symmathesies of both people and software that have the capacity to accommodate and adapt to surprises. My work encompasses talks, books, courses, screencasts, articles, newsletters, podcasts, pair-programming-as-a-service, consulting, and more.
