I've read Design Patterns and similar material. While I've certainly picked up some good ideas, it seems that most of the techniques are simply the normal ruby way, or are only necessary for lower level languages and aren't applicable.
There are a lot of really useful things that can be done with method_missing, duck-typing, closures, reflection, all the metaprogramming stuff, etc. Most of what I understand of that comes from looking through the source of ruby projects.
Are there any books or other resources on design patterns or techniques specific to dynamic languages?
I have an old issue of Dr. Dobb's Journal (August 1997), that has an
article entitled: "Dynamic Design Patterns in Objective-C: Dynamic run
times affect how programs are designed and built". While the article
focuses mainly on Objective-C and gives some examples from the
NeXTStep Runtime (today in use as Mac OS X's Cocoa), the dynamic
runtime of Objective-C is sufficiently similar to Ruby's that many of
the same principles apply. Apparently, the full text of the article
is available here:
There is another, "Replace Mixin With Class", but I haven't made a
writeup of that one yet. (I will, its just that I am up to my eyebrows
in other projects right now.)
"Programs must be written for people to read, and only incidentally
for machines to execute."
- H. Abelson and G. Sussman
(in "The Structure and Interpretation of Computer Programs)