Mario Carrion
Real cool book: "Ruby Performance Optimizations", I hope more people read it. pic.twitter.com/wvQ7nIjewb
— Mario Carrion (@mariocarrion) January 4, 2017
New year 2017 starts with a bang!
I said I was not going to spend any more of my time doing Ruby stuff, but I couldn’t pass the opportunity to read this book, I did not know for sure if it was good or bad, not a lot of information out there, but what could go wrong if I read it?
Ruby Performance Optimization (affiliate link) was written by Alexander Dymo and published by The Pragmatic Bookshelf in 2015, I got it during a sale and I couldn’t be any more happier after reading it.
I enjoyed the book a lot, I’m surprised is not more popular, maybe Ruby developers don’t care too much performance? Not sure. The key takeaways from this book are the following:
- Using iterators incorrectly could be a reason certain code is underperforming, too much Rubyisims chained together may kill the radio star.
- Explicitly indicating the fact you can not, and should not, try to use Ruby for everything. Thing which for whatever reason sometimes I find difficult to understand why some Ruby developers don’t get, some swear by the language and want to use it for everything. Strange.
- The introduction of several profiling tools, a new one I did not know: KCachegrind
- Several tricks using ruby-prof, a well known Ruby gem.
- Confidence interval
- Query Tests, to actually test the generated SQL, and Benchmark Tests to have proper way to determine if the code degraded (or improved!) after a change.
Overall great book, I really hope all Ruby developers find it sooner than later because it covers a lot of great/fundamental topics and includes clear explanations describing how to properly benchmark code by using all the available tools. Nice.