From: Marc Heiler <shevegen@...>
Date: 2007-07-01T18:38:02+09:00
Subject: Re: newby non/programmer trying to understand classes

Hi, welcome!


"I want to improve my skills and try to leverage the language instead of 
just
brute forcing my way through problems.  "

When i started on ruby, i was mostly doing php-style.

I had 0 classes, i used a lot of functions (in php), and i used a lot of 
global vars as well.

However over the time I started to use classes everywhere. It makes the 
code cleaner in my experience. You will surely find your personal style. 
As a rule of thumb, these things helped me in ruby:

- Only because a certain feature exists, you do not really have to use 
it if you arent sure about a use case. For me it was with lambda ;) and 
one more were
class variables (which I personally do not use. Less complexity is 
easier for me to manager, and i am not sure why to use a class var 
anyway)

- Use namespaces! Many wrap their classes inside a module, but I find 
even a standalone module without a class totally neat.

- Consistent code layout :) tabs or spaces doesnt matter ( i use 2 
spaces..) as long as you stick to it

- Back to your first post, and I see a user wrote that classes are not 
needed.
I think it depends on your mind-set. For me, I write classes almost 
everywhere these days. It may be a little extrawork but I felt that 
wrapping methods to classes (or modules) is really nicer on the long 
run. I keep reusing my own code stuff in other apps i write


- About  attr_accessor :first, :last etc... i recommend to write all 
attr_'s in one place... at best on "top" of your class ie

class Foobar
  attr_reader :matz

I even do this:

  attr_reader   :matz
  attr_writer   :really
  attr_accessor :rocks

just because I like visual code formatting, but i think most others 
write
multiple :foo, :bar on one line...  ;)

PS: No matter how you end up writing code, I believe its very important 
to
provide docu which EXPLAINS to others what you were doing. Especially 
sometimes I end up seeing code of other people which is really hard to 
understand, not so much because I dont understand everything (i still 
learn a lot of new things) but more so because they do it IMHO in a 
complex manner ... this is hard to understand sometimes.

PSS: Just my 1 cc to it, hope you have FUN with ruby! There are many 
ways but one way is always the best in a given situation :-)

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