The RSpec Book (Amazon.com) by David Chelimsky (plus a cadre of BDD superstars) is a recent release from The Pragmatic Programmers and a handy addition to any TDD-mad or RSpec-using developer's bookshelf. You can buy a copy from Amazon.com, Amazon.co.uk, or direct from the publisher (more expensive but a PDF version is available).
It's been a killer month for new Ruby and Rails jobs over at the Ruby Inside Jobs board so I'm going to cut the filler to a minimum today.. though if you want to learn more about posting one of your own, check our Post A Job page. The current bonus is you'll get your job ad into the 4000+ subscriber-strong Ruby Weekly for free!
Eloquent Ruby (Amazon.com - print & Kindle) by Russ Olsen is the first Ruby book I've read in its entirety within 24 hours; it's that good. That may be all you need to know before you buy a copy at Amazon.com, Amazon.co.uk or read it on Safari (if you have an account). If you want to learn more though, keep reading.
Yes, I'm sad enough to have had this in my calendar for some time but.. it's Ruby's 18th "birthday" today! Happy Birthday Ruby! While this means it can drink, vote, and otherwise join its slightly older friends Perl (24) and Python (21) in the nightclubs of Europe, I was surprised to learn that coming of age in Japan is at 20 years old.
Rails 3 is great. RSpec 2 is great. And Ruby 1.9.2 is really great. Getting them all running together and quickly, however, isn't entirely straightforward. In this post I demonstrate how to get everything ticking over along with automatically running, super-snappy test runs.
It's been a dies horribilis for MRI Ruby today with two new security vulnerabilities forcing the release of 3 new recommended production versions of the de facto official Ruby interpreter. The first, a vulnerability in FileUtils.remove_entry_secure affects both 1.8 and 1.9 branches, while the second, a $SAFE mode vulnerability, affects only 1.8.
It's time for us to thank the companies who help to keep Ruby Inside going by kindly sponsoring our work. So.. thank you! (And thank you for reading too, naturally.)
Ryan Davis has announced the release of RubyGems 1.5.0. It comes just a month after the release of 1.4 which, notoriously, didn't work with Ruby 1.9.2. These problems have now all been ironed out and Ruby 1.8 and 1.9 users alike can safely upgrade (fingers crossed).
Clever Algorithms is a newly released book by Jason Brownlee PhD that describes 45 algorithms from the Artificial Intelligence (AI) field with Ruby-based examples. It's well produced and, notably, free in its PDF and online formats. A print copy is available at a small cost.
How would you like to get a full Ruby on Rails stack up on Ubuntu with one command?
RailsInstaller is a new project from Wayne E Seguin (of RVM fame) that brings RubyInstaller-style simplicity to getting Ruby and Rails set up on Microsoft Windows (XP, Vista, or 7). In a single wizard-driven installation you get Ruby 1.8.7-p330 (with DevKit), Rails 3.0.3, Git, and SQLite 3.
Eloy Duran (of the Dutch Rails consultancy Fingertips) has put together an interesting side project: a WebKit plugin written in MacRuby. His 'MacRubyWebKitPluginExample' project on GitHub is a short, self contained example of how to pull it off, so it's worth checking out if you want to do something similar. Eloy's example simply allows Ruby code to be supplied by a text box in a WebView and then executed by MacRuby on the back end.