Ruby
Ruby is a very expressive programming language, whose design was influenced by some of the best bits of Perl, Smalltalk, Eiffel, Ada and Lisp. Ruby occupies a similar niche to Python – both languages are dynamically typed, support garbage collection and provide great libraries of re-usable code.
Ruby boasts excellent support object oriented programming (you can even use prototypal inheritance) and functional programming. In short, it’s an excellent general purpose programming language.
The Ruby community is very active, but you can easily keep up with what’s going on at RubyFlow. You can also follow RubyFlow on Twitter.
Learning Ruby
If you’re new to Ruby you could do worse things with your time than to read Why’s Poignant Guide to Ruby (as technical books go it’s not to everybody’s taste, but it’s hugely entertaining and very well written – it might just get you hooked).
If you’re new to programming as well as Ruby I’d recommend the Pragmatic Programmer’s Learn to Program book.
More experienced programmers may find Programming Ruby and The Ruby Way by Hal Fulton more suitable.
Once you’ve got to grips with OO programming in Ruby, Dave Thomas’s series of Ruby metaprogramming screencasts will give you an in depth understanding of how Ruby works (it’ll also show you how to do the prototypal inheritance that I mentioned above).
Ruby Meta-Programming Screencasts
A brief review of Dave Thomas’s series of screencasts on the Ruby Object Model. The short version of this review might be “they’re good, get them.”
Articles on Ruby
Ruby Manor
Ruby Manor is one of those alternative conferences. It’s not run for a profit. It doesn’t cost a lot of money to attend (at £8 per head you pay just enough to cover the cost of the room and equipment), and the quality of the talks is consistently high.
I spent most of the day typing frantically, but I didn’t manage to capture everything. The photos that are littered through my write up of the day are all thanks to @glenngillen from Rubypond, who was sat next to me snapping away.
Benchmarking Ruby exception handling
Which is better, handling an exception or explicitly checking to see whether or not your code is going to break? The answer is “it depends”. On the one hand exception handling allows us to write more legible code (often summed up by the saying “it’s easier to ask forgiveness than permission”). On the other, handling an exception is often a costly operation; it can be faster to “look before you leap”.
Ruby Lightning Talks
Tonight’s LRUG meeting consisted of 8 quick 20x20 format presentations (20 slides, 20 seconds per slide) on a range of Ruby related topics. The speakers covered packaging gems for Debian, sending IM messages with XMPP, a quick intro to ruby-debug, RubyGame, smoke testing, Twitter bots and statistics in Ruby via the power of R.
Opening Ruby gems in TextMate
How often do you find yourself wanting to check the source code of a locally installed Ruby gem? Do you find it painful digging around your filesystem to locate the gems directory?
Rather than this:
mate /Library/Ruby/Gems/1.8/gems/activerecord-2.0.2I now type this:
mategem activerec[tab]Note the tab key, which converts “activerecord” into “activerecord-2.0.2”.
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