|
Issue 74 - December 26, 2011 
From the Editor's Desk..
Due to the holidays it's a slimmer than usual edition of Ruby Weekly today, but I'm starting something new. At the bottom of this e-mail is a new section called 'Ruby Picks' where a fellow Rubyist shares a few key Ruby libraries or tools they're enjoying. We start with James Edward Gray II of The Ruby Quiz and Ruby Rogues fame. See you in 2012!
Headlines
Ruby 1.8.7-p352 and earlier are affected by a wide reaching (as in Python and Java are also affected!) hash related vulnerability. Ruby 1.9 is entirely unaffected.
JRuby 1.6.5.1 is a minor patchlevel release of JRuby that's mostly interesting because of the potential hash-based DOS vulnerability it papers over. Plenty of info in this post.
KidsRuby is a kid-focused (but just as useful for adults!) Ruby editor aimed at being an environment for teaching the Ruby language. It includes tutorials and a Logo-esque turtle graphics system for more visual types of learning.
Articles and Tutorials
MiniTest is the unit testing library that comes in the Ruby 1.9 standard library and which also acts as a compatibility layer for test/unit on 1.9. Matt Sears has put together a handy round up of the assertions and matchers offered by MiniTest::Unit and MiniTest::Spec.
Gregory Brown looks at seven structural design patterns laid out by the Gang of Four, the Adapter, Bridge, Composite, Proxy, Decorator, Facade and Flyweight.
Rails core team member Santiago Pastorino notes that running 'bundle exec rails' is an inefficient mistake and explains why. (TLDR: Just use 'rails', it'll work out the particulars.)
Mike Gunderloy looks at Ruby gems that only have a single letter as their name. It's a mixture of junk and curiosities.
Ruby's own 'Raganwald' has compiled his essays about combinatory logic, method combinators and Ruby meta-programming into a handy and inexpensive e-book. Cerebral stuff.
Media (Video and Audio)
I really enjoyed this keynote by 'Uncle Bob' at the recent Ruby Midwest 2011 conference. He talks about application architecture and how the typical 'Rails way' of approaching it has key disadvantages compared to a decoupled approach.
At November's Ruby Midwest 2011, Ethan Gunderson gave a talk on common mistakes made when working with ActiveRecord and how to make everything all better.
At September's Golden Gate Ruby Conference, Konstantin Haase gave a talk about implementing a programming language using Ruby and the Rubinius compiler tool chain.
Ryan Bates takes it back to basics this week with a quick 7 minute sweep through some of the sites, tools, and books you'll find useful when starting out with Rails as of late 2011.
An inexpensive 34 minute screencast by Ben Orenstein that teaches you how to use the popular Vim text editor when working with Rails projects. Ben has a lot of experience in this area.
Aaron 'tenderlove' Patterson rejoins the Rogues for an hour long chat about benchmarking and profiling Ruby code. There's a lot of depth here and it makes for a typically good and roguish listen.
Ruby Jobs of the Week
James Edward Gray II's Ruby Picks
 James Edward Gray II (@JEG2) has been in the Ruby community since before Rails shipped. He's been involved in almost every aspect of the community over the years and these days he's a regular panelist on the Ruby Rogues podcast and is teaching Rubyists all his favorite tricks in his Rubies in the Rough column.
His picks:
Pry - I've finally kicked IRb to the curb in favor of this more useful REPL.
faraday - A neat "reverse Rack" library that abstracts the process of making Web requests and allows the use of middleware to modify them. I show off how I've used it in this slide deck.
Typhoeus - My favorite HTTP backend to use with faraday or just on its own. You can't beat it for making multiple requests in parallel.
You opted in to Ruby Weekly at RubyWeekly.com to get weekly e-mails
about the Ruby programming language. Reading this as a non-subscriber? Click here to subscribe.
To unsubscribe, click here or e-mail the list maintainer directly at rw@peterc.org.
To change your e-mail address, click here.
Address: Office 30, Lincoln Way, Fairfield Enterprise Centre, Louth, Lincs, UK, LN11 9EJ
|