The Last Week in Ruby: Rails 3.1.1, Sinatra Recipes, Spree Gets Funded and more
Back in 2008 and 2009, Ruby Inside had a long line of "Interesting Ruby Tidbits That Don’t Need Separate Posts" posts, aimed at sharing a collection of news and libraries in one hit. In the last year, I've shifted Ruby Inside to focusing on less frequent tutorials or investigative features and have been putting all of the news on Ruby Weekly, my weekly newsletter.
There are still many, though, who would prefer to read the news in their RSS readers or on the Web, so I'm going to be taking the things I find for Ruby Weekly each week, doing a little reformatting, and sharing them here on Ruby Inside too. The longer articles will then slot in nicely in between :-)
So here we go, starting off from Ruby Weekly issue 63. You can check out the full 63 issue archive, if you like, or even sign up for Ruby Weekly here if you weren't familiar with it. Or, of course, stay here on Ruby Inside and get the same (or more) each week - it's your choice!
Without further ado..
Headlines
Rails Recipes: Rails 3 Edition (in Beta)
Chad Fowler has been updating the Pragmatic Programmers' Rails Recipes book to Rails 3.1 standards. It's in beta now (as an e-book) with the full print release expected in December 2011.
Spree (Open Source Rails E-commerce System) Raises $1.5 Million
Spree is a popular open source Rails e-commerce system and its creator has raised $1.5m in venture capital to take it even further (as well as offer Spree-based consulting). Tom Preston Werner (GitHub) and James Lindenbaum (Heroku) have joined as advisors.
Articles and Tutorials
Sinatra Recipes - Handy Recipes for Working with Sinatra
Sinatra Recipes is a community contributed set of recipes and techniques for working with the popular Sinatra webapp library. There are examples of using many different libraries with Sinatra that are bound to prove useful, if only to learn from.
Give It A Pry
Pry is a powerful REPL environment for Ruby and an ideal alternative to IRB. Jon Jackson shows off his top 5 reasons for switching to Pry - maybe they'll convince you too.
Rubyists Already Use Monadic Patterns
Monadic programming is a pattern that comes up in a lot of code, just like most patterns. While associated with pure functional language like Haskell, Dave Fayram demonstrates how many patterns used by Ruby developers are monadic too.
The Ruby 1.9 Walkthrough: Go Deep on Ruby 1.9
The Ruby 1.9 Walkthrough is a thorough, up-to-date video walkthrough of Ruby 1.9 - perfect for 1.8 developers who are unsure about the leap. Even Ruby 1.9 guru James Edward Gray II said he picked up plenty of stuff from it.. but beware, it's long :-)
Presentations and Videos
Gregory Moeck: Why You Don't Get Mock Objects
Not a big fan of mock objects in testing? Don't even know what mocks are? Get up to speed with Gregory Moeck who makes a convincing case for mocks in this RubyConf 2011 replay. In essence, if you're doing object orientation properly, you need mocks (ooh, controversial!)
Your Data, Your Search: ElasticSearch
A wonderful Ruby-focused slide-deck by Karel Minarik (that was presented at EURUKO 2011) all about the concept of 'searching', the flaws in naive solutions, and a tour of the ElasticSearch system and using it from a Rails app.
Complex Ruby Concepts Simplified (Presentation)
At RubyConf 2011, Matt Aimonetti gave a presentation that dug into Ruby's garbage collection, C interface, global interpreter lock, and more, and the slides are definitely easy (and worthwhile) to follow.
The Intro to Rails Screencast I Wish I Had
Over at NetTuts+, Jeffrey Way has put together an interesting 40 minute 'introduction to Rails' screencast that takes the high road and covers topics like TDD, auto testing, RSpec, and Capybara. It's an introduction for people who want to get it right first try.
Libraries and code
Tire: A Rich Ruby API for the ElasticSearch Search Engine/Database System
Tire is a Ruby client for ElasticSearch, written by Karel Minarik. ElasticSearch is a scalable, distributed, cloud-ready, highly-available, full-text search engine and database with powerfull aggregation features, communicating by JSON over RESTful HTTP, based on Lucene, written in Java.
Queue Classic: A Powerful PostgreSQL-Backed Queueing Library
Queue Classic is a PostgreSQL-backed queueing library built by Ryan Smith of Heroku that focuses on concurrent job locking, minimizing database load and providing a simple, intuitive user experience.
Ruby Jobs of the Week
Sr (Agile) Software Engineer at Apple [Cupertino, CA]
Apple is seeking the very best engineers to be part of a continuously tested and integrated development process in its Developer Publications team. The systems they build are used for all Apple developer documentation for Mac OS X and iOS. You need deep knowledge of Ruby including Rails, RSpec, Bundler and Devise.
Last but not least..
The Ruby Toolbox Gets A Makeover
The Ruby Toolbox is a popular site that categorizes and rates gems by their popularity and functionality. If you're looking for a gem and you can't quite figure out which ones are out there, it's worth a look. A recent redesign has really kicked things up a notch.
