Ruby Version of Refactoring In the Works

Posted by Obie Fernandez on Jan 12, 2007 10:00 AM

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Martin Fowler's venerable Refactoring book is getting a facelift. Noted Ruby blogger Jay Fields today announced that he and a team of ThoughtWorks colleagues are busy "porting" the book's sample code from Java to Ruby. Much of the revised content will be posted online, for review by the community. On completion, the book should be published by Addison Wesley, potentially as part of their Professional Ruby Series.

I asked Jay to explain the rationale behind undertaking this project now, and this is what he said:

Refactoring is my favorite book and I believe it's crucial for any professional software developer.  I hope to increase it's audience size by presenting a version that doesn't require you to read Java examples.  I feel this version will appeal to people who have developed mostly in PHP, Perl, and other dynamic languages.

According to Jay, his co-authors are John Hume, Stephen Chu and Ali Aghareza, selected from among the burgeoning ranks or Ruby professionals at ThoughtWorks. The authors are aiming for one refactoring per week, and with about 140 refactorings contained in the book, if they meet their goal, the book might make it to print before the end of 2007. Two chapters are already done, including the one posted today as an example on Jay's blog. Readers wanting to follow progress may do so at the book's website.

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