The great thing about Gists is that they’re full Git repositories in disguise, so I can just clone my library, work on it and push a new “release” without having to fiddle around in Gist’s web interface.

https://gist.github.com/1232884

Knee-deep in ActiveRecord::Relation code yesterday, I was reminded of some interesting nuggets that I’ve seen used far too rarely. Here, I’ve gathered my top ten most underused relation methods from that list for your reading delight.

When writing code that will be used by others (and we do that 100% of the time, even if the other user is ourselves in a few weeks time), there’s a tricky balance to strike between being generous to the users of our code, and ensuring that they get the information they want to ensure they’re calling our code correctly. There are two coding maxims: “Be generous on input, and strict on output”, and “fail fast”, which we need to hold in tension. This post explores the trade-offs between the two.

But it occurred to me that we could use Ruby's singleton methods to give AIR and WATER a little smarts:

Many articles found in the Ruby community largely oversimplify the use of DCI. These articles, including my own, highlight how DCI injects Roles into objects at runtime, the essence of the DCI architecture. Many posts regard DCI in the following way:

a side-by-side reference sheet

With our knowledge of PHP we can learn a lot about Ruby. Use of variables, loops, arrays, functions and classes, everything starting from PHP. In the end, there is an example to see all together where we’ll combine what we have learnt to see something really useful in action.

The Koans walk you along the path to enlightenment in order to learn Ruby. The goal is to learn the Ruby language, syntax, structure, and some common functions and libraries. We also teach you culture. Testing is not just something we pay lip service to, but something we live. It is essential in your quest to learn and do great things in the language.