From: Robert Klemme <shortcutter@...>
Date: 2006-07-06T23:55:26+09:00
Subject: Re: A newbie would like some code criticism, please...

Just Another Victim of the Ambient Morality wrote:
>     I'm learning Ruby and I'd like some criticism on a program that I wrote. 
> It interfaces with iTunes and runs through all the songs, (reasonably) 
> ensuring proper title capitalization.  It's a small program and I would have 
> simply posted except that, for some unknown reason, MS Outlook Express keeps 
> converting the tabs into single spaces.
>     I'm open to comments on style versus what is standard protocol for the 
> Ruby community, as well.
>     I hope the program may be as useful to any of you as it is for me...
> 
> http://theorem.ca/~dlkong/iTunes_title_filter.rb.gz
> 
> 
>     There's also a pattern that often comes up for me and I would like some 
> help with it...
> 
> first = true
> list.each do |item|
>     if first
>         # do something special for the first case
> 
>         first = false
>     else
>         # do something else for every other item
>     end
> end
> 
>     Is there a better way to do this?  Perhaps some way to simply iterate 
> over every element other than the first one?  Something that avoid a check 
> every iteration?

Sometimes also #inject will help but that depends on what you do in the 
block.  For example:

irb(main):001:0> %w{aa bb cc dd}.inject {|a, b| a + ", " + b}
=> "aa, bb, cc, dd"

Other than that I'd probably stick with the solution that uses 
#each_with_index because it at least avoids creating a new array.

Kind regards

	robert