Issue 63 - October 12, 2011
From the Editor's Desk..
Welcome to issue 63 of Ruby Weekly! We're proud to again be sponored by Startup Digest and I'm excited to be sharing a full-time Ruby position at Apple in the jobs section too. Other than that, on with the links and I hope you're having a great week.
Headlines
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.
Andrew Chalkley, friend of Ruby Weekly and chief dude of screencasts.org, is running a three day introduction to Rails class in Leeds, United Kingdom at the end of this month. If you can make it, I recommend it.
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.
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Articles and Tutorials
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.
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.
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 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
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!)
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.
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.
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 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 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
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 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.
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