Category Archives: Ruby on Rails Tutorials & Articles

RubySource: Code Safari: End of the Road

Posted on July 10, 2011 by admin

This is my last post in the Code Safari series here on Ruby Source. I have really enjoyed writing it and trying out a new format which I hope you have found useful. For my concluding article, I want to leave you with some tips for planning your own safari since that is really what the whole series has been about: Not your typical how-to, but a glimpse into the work flow that I and many other developers use everyday to figure out how our tools work. Here are five practices that you should incorporate in to your day-to-day craft Continue reading →

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RubySource: Rails Development 101: RVM

Posted on July 1, 2011 by admin

rubysource-icon115x115 This post marks the first in a series to help you start from nothing and end with a Rails application. Although there are many posts/series on this subject, I feel like basic Rails tutorials, especially in the wake of Rails 3.1 changes, fall into a more-the-merrier category. Even so, this series will focus on setting things up in a proper manner (for those systems that support it) and will fly a little lower than the typical 50,000 foot level of many tutorials. Here are the items you will have learned by the end of the series: Setting up Ruby Version Manager (RVM) to maintain sandboxed development environments Installing Ruby 1.9.2 Installing Rails 3.1 Creating a rails application What Rails IDEs exist, and their pros/cons Creating a resource for your application to create/retrieve/update/delete Modifying a view template What to do next This series ends where a lot of single post series end, but my goal is to make sure that you have much more information when you get to the end Continue reading →

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RubySource: Code Safari: Underscore Madness

Posted on June 27, 2011 by admin

Last week I came across an excellent presentation from the Scotland Ruby Conference: “Literary Criticism for the Idle Programmer” by Roland Swingler . It introduced me to a crazy little ruby script that allows you to write programs entirely in underscores! # hello.rb require “_” ____ _ _____ ____ __ ____ ____ __ ___ ____ __ __ _ ______ _____ ___ _ _ ___ _____ ______ ____ _ _ ____ _ _ ____ _ ____ __ __ ___ _ ______ ___ ____ __ ______ ____ _ ____ ____ __ _ ____ _ _ ___ _____ _____ _ ______ ____ _ ______ _____ That’s a hello world app, right there. I scarcely believed it either. Roland steps through briefly how this code works in his talk, but given our previous obfuscation adventures , I wanted to dive in a little deeper Continue reading →

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RubySource: Confessions of a Converted PHP Developer: Animal Abuse

Posted on June 24, 2011 by admin

Thumbnail Sometimes the functionality of a library or set of classes that you’re working with is 99% perfect for the job, but the last 1% requires modification of some of the core assumptions made in the code. Altering code can cause maintenance frustrations down the track and extending code can cause maintenance frustration right away, but Ruby provides us with a flexible way to modify code with less damage. In converting to Ruby I realized how strict PHP is in its class hierarchy. Continue reading →

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RubySource: Dan Cheail, Unplugged.

Posted on June 20, 2011 by admin

Thumbnail Given that Dan once ran RubySource and I’d already put a face to the name at one RORO meeting a couple of weeks earlier, it was stellar to actually get to know him better over the weekend. Additionally, I felt the title of Unplugged was justified, as he was playing acoustic guitar through the weekend. He’s as friendly as he is tall, which is taller than average, so he was happy to answer some questions for us! Tell us a some things about yourself, Dan. I started programming using BASIC when I was six, I sort of progressed from there through basic C, Pascal, Visual Basic, until I discovered the web in about ’95 and thought “right, this is for me”. Continue reading →

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RubySource: Code Safari: Forks, pipes, and the Parallel gem

Posted on June 16, 2011 by admin

Thumbnail A few weeks ago, I wrote an article about splitting out work to be done into threads to improve performance of a URL checker. A commenter noted that the parallel gem could be used to achieve the same result, which got me all curious. I investigated the gem and found that not only can it parallelize into threads, it also supports splitting out work into multiple processes . I wonder how that works Continue reading →

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