This week I spent some time learning how to use Pry. For those of you who haven’t tried this wonderful alternative to IRB, spend two hours with it. You’ll never go back. I won’t be hitting on all the features Pry has to offer (because there are plenty), just the ones that immediately jumped out as useful to me. Pry has some of the best documentation and one of the friendliest, most helpful IRC channels out there so if you want more in-depth coverage, go check them out.

Last week HipByte released RubyMotion and although I was originally skeptical, I’m now fully on board. I wouldn’t consider myself an Objective-C developer over, lets say, a Ruby developer or C# developer. I’m simply a developer that likes to learn. When a client brought in an idea that needed an iOS app, I wrote it in Objective-C with Xcode like a good boy. The size of the app made it perfect to rewrite in RubyMotion which gave me a chance to compare and contrast.

collection of links from beginner to advance to learn ruby and associated technologies

RubyMotion is a revolutionary toolchain for iOS.
It lets you quickly develop and test native iOS applications for iPhone or iPad, all using the awesome Ruby language you know and love.

ShinyCocos is an easy way to create games using Cocos2D-iPhone and ruby scripting language. Embedded with your application is a ruby 1.9 interpreter, and ShinyCocos is just a library that easily binds ruby classes and modules to their corresponding Cocos2D classes.

Are you fed up with Objective-C? Now, you can build iOS apps with Ruby (mruby)!.

Data Structures and Algorithms
with Object-Oriented Design Patterns in Ruby

Sinatra application to show a pre-launch page and collect emails

I’ve worked with Rails for quite a while now and in that time I’ve seen a lot of Rails applications and both read and written a lot of bad Ruby code. Here’s five common mistakes that I see in almost every Rails codebase.

VIM plugin that allows you to run a Ruby REPL inside a VIM buffer.

Open Source Rails 3.2 Example Apps and Tutorials

This is a website and GitHub repository for open source Ruby on Rails example apps and Rails tutorials.

It spans the gap between Ruby on Rails tutorials for beginners and the piecemeal advice found on experts’ blogs.

Here’s what you can do:

follow the Rails tutorials and examine the code to to see examples of complete working Rails 3.2 web applications
download code (“clone a repository”) to customize an app for your own use
use an application template to generate a ready-made starter app
modify an application template to make your own custom starter app

New to Rails? See a list of recommended resources for Rails.

Are you getting an error “OpenSSL certificate verify failed” with Ruby?

Or an error “Gem::RemoteFetcher::FetchError: SSL_connect returned=1 errno=0”?

Here are suggestions.

This is a note for developers using the starter apps from the Rails Apps repository. Many others have found it helpful as well.

In Ruby, classes and objects are intricately connected in ways that might not be immediately obvious. Owing to their special use-case, it is easy to lose sight of the fact that classes are themselves objects in Ruby. What makes them different, vis-à-vis regular objects, is that they serve as a blueprint for object creation and also that they are part of a hierarchy of classes. That is, classes can have instances (objects), superclasses (parents) and subclasses (children).

OCRA (One-Click Ruby Application) builds Windows executables from Ruby source code. The executable is a self-extracting, self-running executable that contains the Ruby interpreter, your source code and any additionally needed ruby libraries or DLL.

Ruby on Rails CMS that supports Rails 3.2

Refinery is an awesome Rails based CMS. Download it today, and see what all the fuss is about.

Monads have been getting a lot of press lately in connection with the Haskell programming language. They’re a very powerful programming tool in functional languages, but all too often they’re described as some sort of black magic rather than the simple construct they are.

It doesn’t help that the concept of monads is often introduced with Haskell’s IO monad. IO is a strange, magical beast which you can’t see inside, and it’s not typical of most monads you’ll encounter. Also you need a good grasp of Haskell to understand it, which is tough because most modern Haskell coding requires an understanding of monads in the first place.

Now, monads are important to Haskell programming, but they aren’t a special feature of Haskell. You can do them in any programming language that support closures and anonymous functions. That means the obvious suspects, like ML and Lisp dialects, but it also includes languages which are more familiar to many…

Destroy All Software screencasts are short: 10 to 15 minutes, but dense with information. They're released each week, covering advanced topics like these:

At the moment I’m reading page 30 and in the chapter I’ve just finished I’ve learned how to create a simply yet powerful recommendations system that uses both euclidean distance and Pearson correlation score to determine the affinity between people based on how they have ranked objects.

For example you can measure the affinity between people based on how they rank movies or, with a little effort, the affinity between two movies based on how they have been ranked.

While reading this book I had to face a little trouble…

All the samples are written in Python!

and as you may have guessed I don’t know almost anything about this programming language. So, with the help of a good manual I’ve started to translate the code from Python to Ruby. The result after the first 30 pages is ready for you to download at the end of this post.

API Builders
Frameworks that streamline the process of building a web API

Ruby and Rails setup script for Linux and OSX
ZIP

Laptop is a set of scripts to get your Mac OS X laptop set up as a development machine. — Read more
ZIP

Capybara helps you test Rails and Rack applications by simulating how a real user would interact with your app. It is agnostic about the driver running your tests and comes with Rack::Test and Selenium support built in. WebKit is supported through an external gem.

I'm having trouble getting the Ruby Version Manager rvm to source from my Ubuntu 10.04 .profile. The code:

[[ -s "$HOME/.rvm/scripts/rvm" ] && . "$HOME/.rvm/scripts/rvm"
...never does what I expect it to (i.e. give me the rvm program when I open a new shell or start a new session); but if I execute

source .profile
in a new shell after logging in, it works! Why will it work when I manually source it, but not automatically at login?

Blog post: ryanbigg.com/2011/10/screencast-pilot/

In this video I provide a walkthrough of implementing some of the rules of Conway's Game of Life in Ruby using RSpec and what Ruby's standard library gives to us.

God is an easy to configure, easy to extend monitoring framework written in Ruby.

Keeping your server processes and tasks running should be a simple part of your deployment process. God aims to be the simplest, most powerful monitoring application available.

Hacker News
This tiny script is a scraper for http://news.ycombinator.com. It shows just how little Ruby is required to run a powerful web filter.

What it be doin':
Fetches the YCombinator news page
HPricot's it into pieces
Builds an RSS feed
Uses links to parse the destination article page and include the main text inline
Runs as a stand-alone server thanks to Rack and Mongrel

I finally set up a continuous deployment (CD) server for Ducky Guidance. I decided to use Jenkins since we already have a Windows Jenkins server for our Sitecore projects.

Android, HTML5, Java, jQuery, Ruby, and Python TechTV talks by Markana, all very excellent

hub is a command line utility which adds GitHub knowledge to git.

It can be used on its own or as a git wrapper.

Although the World-Wide Web was initially conceived as a vehicle for delivering documents, it is now being used as a platform for sophisticated interactive applications, displacing the traditional mechanism of installable binaries. Web-based applications offer numerous advantages, such as instant access, automatic upgrades, and opportunities for collaboration on a massive scale. However, creating Web applications requires different approaches than traditional applications and involves the integration of numerous technologies. This class will introduce you to the Web technologies and give you experience creating Web applications. In the process you will learn about markup languages, scripting languages, network protocols, interactive graphics, event-driven programming, and databases, and see how they all work together to deliver exciting applications.

In my last two posts, I covered why you should learn how to code if you're a non-technical entrepreneur and why you should start off learning learning Ruby and Ruby on Rails. Now, on to the good stuff – I'm going to write about the actual steps I took to learn how to code a complete application in Rails in under a month.

Camping is a web framework which consistently stays at less than 4kB of code. You can probably view the complete source code on a single page. But, you know, it’s so small that, if you think about it, what can it really do?

Ruby was written to make the programmer’s job easy and not care if the computer’s job is hard. In this brief introduction we’ll look at the key language features you need to get started.

An introductory talk on UNIX shell programming by Ryan Tomayko presented at GoGaRuCo 2010, a regional Ruby conference in San Francisco.

This code accompanies the Ru3y Manor talk “Programming With Nothing”.

The idea is to implement some basic data structures and control flow under the constraint of only being allowed to create and call procs.

Ruby is a powerful language, but how much power does it have if you remove all of its datatypes except for Proc and all of its features except for Proc.new and Proc#call? I’ll investigate by building proc-only representations of numbers, booleans, lists and strings, and using them to write an executable program.

This article is adapted from a talk I gave at the Ru3y Manor conference, for which the video and slides are available.

We're going to teach you how to build your first Ruby web application in 3 minutes and deploy it live to the internet. Don't worry, you won't have to install or setup anything. We'll take care of all those pesky little details: Ruby, Rails, Git, Gems, configuring SSH keys, and deploying your application to a server.

Vagrant is a tool for building and distributing virtualized development environments.

By providing automated creation and provisioning of virtual machines using Oracle’s VirtualBox, Vagrant provides the tools to create and configure lightweight, reproducible, and portable virtual environments. For more information, see the part of the getting started guide on ”Why Vagrant?”

Are you ready to revolutionize the way you work? Check out the getting started guide, the getting started video.

Learn You The Ruby For Awesome Power

Helping Ruby Programmers become Awesome!

Bobfolio is a simple Ruby web app for your computer programming
portfolio. You can deploy it to Heroku and have a free portfolio up
and running within about 15 minutes if installing Ruby goes well.

You should be able to use Bobfolio with minimal Ruby knowledge, or
just a bit of knowledge about any similar scripting language like
JavaScript, Perl or Python. You're not writing code, just putting
together some data.

A simple Rails and Backbone.js application. Follow the tutorial here: http://www.jamesyu.org/2011/01/27/cloudedit-a-backbone-js-tutorial-by-example/ — Read more
http://cloudedit.jamesyu.org/

Flexible authentication solution for Rails with Warden. — Read more

With the recent release of HAML 3.1, I decided to venture into its depths to figure out what makes it tick. What beasts lurk in the bowels of a templating system?

I'm just getting started with Ruby so please forgive the possibly noobish question. The webapp I'm trying to develop is currently based on sinatra and I'm not sure what the best way to implement secure login feature is. I've found this: [1] http://rubygems.org/gems/sinatra-security project which seems good but it isn't listed on the [2] official sinatra extensions site so I'm not sure if it's legit.

The last few weeks have been a wild ride. Starting in January, I’ve been releasing a chapter at a time here on the RBP blog, and many of those chapters were pretty well commented on. Just for the sake of completeness, here’s a link back to each of those posts:

Do you want to learn how to develop web applications? The Ruby on Rails 3 Tutorial book and screencast series teach you how to develop and deploy real, industrial-strength web applications with Ruby on Rails, the open-source web framework that powers many top websites, including Hulu, GitHub, and the Yellow Pages. The Ruby on Rails 3 Tutorial book is available for free online and is available for purchase as a PDF download (which also includes a free copy of the Ruby on Rails 2.3 Tutorial book). The companion screencast series includes 12 individual lessons totaling more than 15 hours, with one lesson for each chapter of the Ruby on Rails 3 Tutorial book. The best deal is the PDF/screencast bundle, which includes more than 500 pages of total content and more than 15 hours of video—click here to buy it now!

I get it, you want to learn how to program and how to be a hacker, fine let’s do this. It sounds tough but you’ll want to learn two languages for your first time: Ruby and Python. They are similar in syntax and usage cases so this shouldn’t be a big problem. Pick up the basics, the syntax, and the community standards of each. Understand that each has it’s own power and use as well as problems. Read these two books front to back for as long as they interest you, they’re made for beginners so don’t be afraid!

It's been close to a year since Rails 3 came out and I've had the pleasure of working on several Rails 3 projects since its release. Some existing gems became irrelevant with the release of Rails 3, while others lived. Additionally, we've seen many new gems come to life. I'd like to share a stack of gems that I've been using this year. Hopefully they will give people a bit of help while developing a new Rails 3 app.

Learning Ruby, one conversation at a time

…and I am addicted to analytics. It all started when I was a wee lad. I quite enjoyed playing Tecmo NBA Basketball, among other games. One day, while rocking the house with Shawn Kemp and the Seattle Supersonics, I noticed that Tecmo NBA basketball did not seem to be correctly recording rebounds.

One of the great features of the CoffeeScript language is the great expressiveness that allows easy creation of Domain Specific Languages (DSLs). In this post I'll explore this aspect of CoffeeScript more with a reflection on how DSLs are done in Ruby.

At JetBrains, we have a passion for making people more productive through smart software solutions that help them focus more on what they really want to accomplish, and less on mundane, repetitive "computer busy work". We think you will find that our products reflect our dedication to this ideal.

I recently purchased this domain along with a plan from Linode to host it. The first thing I wanted to do with my linode was to set up a Ruby on Rails development/production environment. I settled on using Linodes Arch Linux 2010.05 32bit image to run my VPS. This blog post will outline setting up the Nginx web server, mySQL, Ruby on Rails, and Phusion Passenger. After following the steps provided, you should have a working web server with passenger (aka mod_rails) support.

a side-by-side reference sheet for the hyperpolyglot; there is also a reference sheet for Bash, Tcl, Lua, JavaScript, Io

Lesson Screencasts to walk you through the exercises in the class

With Ruby, and the gosu gem you can do it. It is fairly easy to get going. And if you follow our screencasts, you can have a game going in minutes!

Also, take a look at our recent Show and Tell to get some ideas of the games that can be built by beginners. Have fun!

When you're building a web application, there's always the question of how to handle the site-wide administration. You probably have a small list of people at your company that should be able to access it. If you're like Intridea, you also use Google Apps to handle e-mail etc. Using OmniAuth it is trivially simple to set up a simple "admin login system" for your Rails 3 app. Here's how to do it.

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