Refactoring, Ruby Edition, blends the original content of Martin Fowler's Refactoring with lessons of the past 10 years, resulting in a thorough demonstration of how Ruby practitioners can realize the significant benefits of Refactoring. The illustrative examples are written in Ruby, but the ideas are applicable to any object-oriented programming language. Like the original book, this book shows you where opportunities for refactoring typically can be found, and how to go about reworking a bad design into a good one. Each refactoring step is simple–seemingly too simple to be worth doing. Refactoring may involve moving a field from one class to another, or pulling some code out of a method to turn it into its own method, or even pushing some code up or down a hierarchy. While these individual steps may seem elementary, the cumulative effect of such small changes can radically improve the design. Refactoring is a proven way to prevent software decay.