MasonHolland / night_rewriter

Night ReWriter

Given this classic Mod 1 project, imagine what you can do with your magical Mod 4 power to refactor this codebase.

**Note: feel free to ignore the file I/O part of the project spec."

The NightWriter class in ./lib/night_writer.rb knows quite a bit about the details of how to decode and encode text to and from braille. With abstraction, polymorphism, inheritance, and encapsulation in mind, refactor this program to better align with object-oriented design.

Learning Goals

• Comprehend a brown-field Ruby project
• Improve the project using Ruby best-practices
• Redesign and refactor the project using the four pillars of OOP:
  • Abstraction
  • Polymorphism
  • Inheritance
  • Encapsulation
• Implement sophisticated Ruby patterns and methods

Setup

Ruby version: 2.4.1

Clone this directory and get yourself cded into it. Then:

bundle

Run the whole test suite with:

rake

Run a single test with your standard:

ruby test/the_test_file_test.rb

Constraints

Some external apps depend on the NighWriter#encode_to_braille and NighWriter#encode_from_braille interface. Your refactoring cannot change the end functionality or naming of these methods.

Things to keep in mind

• Single responsibility principle: "who" (i.e., which classes) should be responsible for what?

• Abstraction: hide the details of implementation from classes and objects that don't need to know about those details.

  • Focus on what an object can do, not how it does it.

• Polymorphism: how can you create objects with similar interfaces (i.e., methods) to promote easier collaboration?

• Inheritance: do two or more classes have similar behavior that could be inherited from a parent class or module?

• Encapsulation: which pieces of data and behavior belong in their own class?

Ruby Muscle

• Limit your use of Array#each, for, and times loops. It's possible to not use them at all 😉.

  • Enumerables are your friends!

• Think about private methods. Which methods don't need to be used outside of a given class?

• Look into Array#each_slice.

• Think back to modules.

• Limit complex conditional logic with a hash lookup pattern.