Reference

I don't think the Ruby Jobs site at RubyNow gets enough link love from the community, and I want to put that right. If you haven't been there for a while, you'll be surprised. In just the last two weeks there are 30 new Ruby and Rails jobs available. That's even more than on the 37signals Jobs Board. Even better, if you're an employer you can post to the RubyNow jobs board for free, so check it out.

Ruby Search, a project by Simon Parker, is a special Web search tool that looks through the Rails class index, Rails methods, Ruby standard libraries, and Programming Ruby and presents the results in a simple sidebar to be viewed in a frame on the right. It seems to be a bit patchy from my tests, but it's still a cool tool. (Found via ozmm)

Peter Armstrong has just released the initial version of his PDF-only book, Flexible Rails. It's available for $20, and anyone who buys the book now will get free PDF copies of every subsequent version of the first edition of the book. You can also order the book in 5 copy, 10 copy, and 30 copy editions for use in the workplace.

Chris Wanstrath has put together a 'mix tape' of useful tips and tricks for irb and Rails' script/console. Some great bits and pieces in there, and people are leaving even more tricks and tips in the comments!

Ruby Inside is running a $100 contest for people who write a Ruby or Rails related article, resource post, or tutorial this week. There's still just over 24 hours left to run so get your entries in quickly if you want a chance at winning the $100. So far there have been 16 entries and they're all pretty good. But.. there are only two entries for the second prize so far, so if you want some great odds at winning the $15 second prize, link to the contest and let us know about it!

HTTP Request => Rails 'params'

GET: /users => [:action => 'index']
GET: /users.xml => [:action => 'index', :format => 'xml']
GET: /users/1 => [:action => 'show', :id => 1]
GET: /users/1;edit => [:action => 'edit', :id => 1]
GET: /users/1.xml => [:action => 'show', :id => 1, :format => 'xml']
POST: /users => [:action => 'create']
PUT: /users/1 => [:action => 'update', :id => 1]
DELETE: /users/1 => [:action => 'destroy', :id => 1]

Prolific 'Edge Rails' blogger Ryan Daigle has written "Simply RESTful Support - And How to Use It", a great walkthrough of the features offered by the simply_restful plugin that's now a core part of Edge Rails and which will provide a lot of the new functionality to be seen in Rails 1.2.

I initially thought there was only one PayPal library for Ruby, but apparently not. Here's all those I've found:

The unstoppable Coda Hale presents an amazing article about setting up a server with Mongrel, Apache, Capistrano, SSL support, etc. for solidly serving Rails applications. An extremely well written and solid guide.

Many coders will reach a situation where developing a C extension makes sense, whether for doing 'heavy lifting', diving into assembly language, interfacing with other C code, etc. Luckily, developing a basic Ruby extension in C is easy.

Mauricio Fernandez reports that the next minor version of Ruby, Ruby 1.8.5, is due for release in mid August to coincide with the Japanese holiday of Obon. Ruby releases are usually tied to holiday periods, most notably Christmas for 1.8.3 and 1.8.4.

Idiomatic Ruby is an online presentation by Toby DiPasquale that goes through some of the more idiomatic features of Ruby, those that newcomers to Ruby might be confused by or overlook. It covers Modules and Mixins, Exceptions, Regular Expressions, Duck Typing, Iterators, method_missing, Continuations, Closures and Blocks, and is very concise and well put together.

Inspired by the legendary (amongst Perl programmers anyway!) Perl Cookbook, comes the Ruby Cookbook. It has the equivalent examples from the Perl Cookbook but in Ruby form, of course. The basic sections are mostly complete, although some of the later sections are barely covered yet. Still, if you want to see the basic recipes for dealing with strings, numbers, dates and times, arrays, hashes, file I/O, process management, and so on, it's a cute little resource.

This is a "short" Ruby on Rails reference. It's goal is to give you an overview over the most used functions / methods / classes. It's not a tutorial, but as a handy guide when you already know your way around.

Stuart Halloway and Justin Gehtland of Relevance LLC have put together an online presentation called AJAX on Rails. It looks at AJAX, its relation to Rails, how Prototype works, and provides lots of great code examples. If you want to brush up on your whole AJAX and Rails knowledge, it's worth looking at. A PDF version is also available.

Basic Ruby

GemJack.com is a basic, but highly effective, site featuring full HTML documentation for most of the Ruby gems (Ruby's library packaging system). Hopefully it'll get indexed by Google in full and beginners will find it easier to find the documentation they want straight from Google.

New to Rails 3? Check out the Ruby on Rails 3 Tutorial book and screencast.