I’ve been reading Russ Olsen’s great book, Design Patterns in Ruby. I’ve always had my developer friends tell me design patterns are a great thing, the jelly to your peanut butter, the Martin to your Lewis if you are a software developer. I gave it the typical…”huh…I’ll have to check that out...sometime.”
No longer.
As have been reading Olsen’s book, I am realizing, it has far-reaching implications that go beyond just writing a Ruby class efficiently. For instance, one of the principles is “separate the things likely to change from the things likely to stay the same.” This sounds simple…and it is. But it’s also incredibly powerful. Have you ever created a large suite of manual test steps, only to have the software change and need to re-write virtually all of them? If you apply this principle, your manual test scripts will be more durable and more flexible. And it didn’t involve writing a single line of Ruby (or any) code. It simply involved applying a true principle.
Take a look at this book…it will definitely cause you to think in a different way. And that’s always a good thing.
