Book Review of POODR: It Helped the Pieces Fit Together

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After an extended blogging hiatus, time to take some baby steps back in by reposting my book review on Goodreads for "Practical Object-Oriented Design in Ruby," aka the POODR book.
This book helped tie together my understanding of OOP best practices in Ruby and has produced immediate benefits in the quality of code I'm writing. It contains great examples of refactoring code, along with checklists, red flags and questions to ask yourself throughout the design process. 
The author does a great job of following the development and improvement of a sample app throughout the book (an app for a bike shop). The continuous narrative helps you see how the pieces fit together, though a few examples from other domains would have been helpful in some places. At the same time, that's really an exercise for the reader. 
I found Chapter 4's discussion of creating a public interface particularly helpful in determining the proper responsibilities of objects by "Asking for 'What' Instead of Telling 'How'." The continued discussion of messages when identifying duck types in Chapter 5 helped reinforce the concepts. The chapters on modules and testing also helped tighten up my thinking on a few topics. 
As I've shifted from hobbyist to freelancer to full time developer over the past few years, there have been a few books or tutorials that have really helped me improve (along with bugging friends and countless hours of troubleshooting), and this is definitely one of them. Highly recommended.

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