From: alex_land <doug.ybarbo@...>
Date: 2007-07-12T06:05:01+09:00
Subject: Re: Beautiful Code : Pity he didn't ask here...

Well i for one am feeling pretty good that i learned Ruby here and not
from a textbook.

Anyway, nice work.  Editors are probably wishing they would have gone
with "Cute Code" or "Decent-Looking Code."


--alex


On Jul 10, 2:15 am, John Carter <john.car...@tait.co.nz> wrote:
> Just got the O'Reilly announcement of the book "Beautiful
> Code"... here is the sample chapter by Tim Bray on Ruby!
>
>    http://www.oreilly.com/catalog/9780596510046/chapter/ch04.pdf
>
> Pity he didn't run his examples by this forum first, I'm sure we could
> have made them more beautiful..
>
> Well, maybe for the 2nd edition, heres my bash at cleaning it up...
>
> For example scanning a log file.....
>
> EXAMPLE 4-2 . Printing article names
> 1 ARGF.each_line do |line|
> 2   if line =~ %r{GET /ongoing/When/\d\d\dx/(\d\d\d\d/\d\d/\d\d/[^ .]+) }
> 3     puts $1
> 4   end
> 5 end
>
> Since most Linux distro's roll the log files to a reasonable size I would have just gone with...
>
> ARGF.read.scan( %r{GET /ongoing/When/\d\d\dx/(\d\d\d\d/\d\d/\d\d/[^ .]+) }) do |match|
>     puts $1
> end
>
> In Example 4.3 he has...
> 1 counts = {}
> 2 counts.default = 0
>
> Personally I prefer...
>   counts = Hash.new(0)
>    or
>   counts = Hash.new{|hash,key| hash[key]=0}
> buts that's personal preference I guess.
>
> In example 4.4 he rightly identifies line 10 as a little ugly and bemoans the lack of sort_by_value in hash.
>    10 keys_by_count = counts.keys.sort { |a, b| counts[b] <=> counts[a] }
> it seems he doesn't know about..
>
> count.keys.sort_by{|key| count[key]}
>
> Of course he could have done...
>
> class Hash
>    def sort_keys_by_value
>      keys.sort_by{|key| fetch(key)}
>    end
> end
>
> Example 4.5 looks like a poster child for the Hash.new block approach...
> 4 @hash = {}