Professional Ruby on Rails™

14.7. References

Jay Fields has a nice online discussion of eval and bindings at http://blog.jayfields.com/2006/07/ruby-eval-with-binding.html. There's an interesting discussion about the benefits and dangers of monkey patching anchored around Chad Fowler's post www.chadfowler.com/index.cgi/Computing/Programming/Ruby/TheVirtuesOfMonkeyPatching.rdoc,v.

One of the best general overviews of Ruby metaprogramming and singleton classes is provided by the Ruby programmer known as "why the lucky stiff" at http://whytheluckystiff.net/articles/seeingMetaclassesClearly.html. (My only quibble is with why's naming conventions, which differ from what I used in this book.)

A plugin called Acts As Taggable On Steroids (or AATOS) was the basis for much of the discussion on plugin structure. Its home page is http://agilewebdevelopment.com/plugins/acts_as_taggable_on_steroids.

I want to acknowledge Dave Thomas's excellent talk on Metaprogramming from The Rails Edge in August 2007. It wasn't a direct influence on this chapter (and the slides are, sadly, not online), but it was a great overview of metaprogramming and a strong defense of using that part of Ruby's toolkit. Plus, it contained the quote, "The key to metaprogramming is understanding self. Isn't that also the key to life?"