Ruby on Rails Planet

R(*)TFM »

Created at: 17.12.2010 04:11, source: Engine Yard Blog, tagged: Uncategorized books RTFM

Ruby. For a developer, the very word describes a world where art and code fall from your fingers like magic from the staff of Gandalf. Rails. An elegant framework for taming the wilds of the interwebs. Unbounded power and productivity await you from the command line all for the low low price of free; well that and typing rails. Typing rails at the command line creates new online universes. It is limitless power. It is the katana of the new digital samurai.... it makes all things online possible. Rails bakes 30 minute brownies in 20 minutes and ensures that you posses the fastest car in existence. It also attracts a metric tonne of people who don't know what they're doing. A framework that's so easy "A Cave Man Could Do It" (tm) is bound to attract more than it's fair share of - well cavemen... and a few Force.com developers. These are people who have not RTFM and in some instances, never will. Infidels who soil the temple of Ruby, Rails and Sinatra with "eval" statements, unseemly for loops and Cargo Culted code. Considering that the Ruby Community is a group of "doers" - bitching without proposing a solution is weak sauce. So, here at Engine Yard we put on our thinking caps and tried to figure out a way to give back a little somethin-somethin to the community. Here's what we came up with: If there are people out there that don't know the right incantations to get the most out of Ruby and Rails, it's our job to help them get all that information. It should not be our job to point and laugh at them.... well at least not until after we try to help them. If you're new to the Ruby community it's not always easy to figure out where to go for good information about how to get off on the right foot. So, today we're inaugurating a grand experiment: Ruby RTFM. We want to make it easy for everyone to write better Ruby, so we're partnering with authors, publishers, blog editors and anyone who can assemble a technically accurate, marginally coherent, sentence to offer books and information for free when we can, and as close to free as the publishers will let us. Our first foray into this brave new world comes from two well known names in the Ruby Community, Chad Pytel (Founder, ThoughtBot) and Tammer Saleh (Ex ThoughtBot, current Engine Yarder), authors of _Rails AntiPatterns_. We couldn't think of a better way to improve the Ruby and Rails code that we see (and cry about) on a daily basis than by giving people an exhaustive set of examples of what not to do. And before you see this for the shameless promotion of a friends book that this is, realize that Tammer owes me money for a bar tab and I'm afraid that the 35% discount that Engine Yard is sponsoring for his book is going to leave him owing me money, and my boss wondering how I managed to buy a few thousand PDFs on my expense report... but that's neither here nor there. Grab the book here and use the 35% off discount code ANTIPATTERNS for as long as my credit card works. Enter the code in all caps at checkout. It's good for the print book, or ebook. Likewise, don't forget to join our new discount books and screencast email list. We'll only use your email to notify you about new Ruby and Cloud informational resources available on the cheap. Or you can follow @engineyard on Twitter, find us on Facebook, or join our Engine Yard Community Group on LinkedIn. We'll be linking to the discount codes and content as fast as we can. If nothing else check out the Cloud Out Loud Podcast, and experience our shameless support for people who write books for our community. This week the podcast features none other than the Runner Up for the sexiest man in Open Source Software, Tammer Saleh (heh heh, if you don't believe me listen to the podcast and search the google cache). As far as we're concerned, this is a community effort. If you're writing a book that can help the community write better Ruby applications, get in touch with us at RTFM@engineyard.com. We want to figure out how to get that information into the hands of as many Rubyists as possible. If you have an idea for writing a book, then read Jeremy McAnally's book on how to write an e-book and drop us a line when you have a draft. We want books for Rubyists by Rubyists on all the stuff that Ruby people need to know. And even though he doesn't know it yet, Danish Khan just volunteered to keep a running list of the best resources for getting started with Ruby on Rails. If all this seems too "elementary" for your advanced Rails Brain - then check out José Valim's Crafting Rails Applications - even Carlhuda could learn something here. At its best, building software is about the judicious mixture of art and information. At its worst, software is a quagmire of terrible ideas expressed in even worse code. Our mission is ensuring no Ruby developer writes bad code because he couldn't afford the PDF, or the bar tab at a GitHub drink up that would have gained her the insight into how to write Ruby the right way. One of the strongest assets in the Ruby world is our community and culture of sharing. Share what you know about Ruby and the Cloud with anyone and everyone who will listen. Inside every .Net developer is a metaprogramming guru waiting to be born. (Behind every .NET developer is a soulless IT shop that loves mind numbing control, but I digress...) As always, let us know what you think - good or bad. -- Randall "RTFM" Thomas *(The R == Ruby, the rest they won't let me type)

Resources for Getting Started with Ruby on Rails »

Created at: 16.11.2010 01:02, source: Engine Yard Blog, tagged: Uncategorized books classes community courses irc rails ruby Tutorials

Ruby on Rails is leaving the early adopter phase and becoming more mainstream. More people want to learn Rails but don't know where to begin. Well, I have come to the rescue. The resource list below is a good starting point. It includes tutorials, books, blogs, podcasts and many other educational resources that have done wonders for me throughout my Rails learning process. I hope others will find them helpful too. I personally enjoy interactive and visual experiences. The interactive tutorials (sometimes with a live person) were very useful to me. However, plenty of other people prefer to learn by reading, so I have included great resources for these folks too. I also recommend attending meetups and conferences. Getting involved in the community is a great way to find mentors who can help you out, and participating at events and user groups is a good way to stay on top of the latest news and cool projects. If I've left out any resources that you've found helpful, I would love to hear about them. Please let me know about them in the comments section.

Learning To Scale Rails With Crappy Programming Book Covers »

Created at: 22.04.2010 02:42, source: Rails Inside, tagged: books Miscellaneous

Jason Seifer (of RailsEnvy / Ruby Show fame) and I were recently captivated by a particularly gorgeous technical book cover:

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Awesome, right? Eric Hodel (of RDoc and RubyGems fame) thought he had a better candidate for crappiest programming book cover:

I'm not entirely sold on the Moon being paved with giant keyboard keys while crazy levels of Icelandic ash flash around the Earth at supersonic speeds, but the attire and poses of the characters lended themselves to some mischief.

The result is Learning To Scale ROR by Cooper and Seifer:

Everyone knows the most important part of a book - and the part by which any book should be judged - is its cover, so Jason Seifer didn't waste any time in releasing a PDF of Learning To Scale ROR. You can even read it on Scribd if you can't read PDFs easily.

Consider it a beta edition so far - it's free, so the price is right. Ultimately, the content is secondary to the awesome cover. In a straw poll on Twitter, about half of Rails developers are considering ordering one or two copies based on the cover alone, so don't delay and download your copy today.

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The Rails 3 Upgrade Handbook by Jeremy McAnally »

Created at: 23.02.2010 02:57, source: Rails Inside, tagged: books

Rails expert Jeremy McAnally (Ruby Inside's "Top Hitter" of 2008) has been interested in Rails 3 for a long time, and he's dropped a lot of time into producing the Rails 3 Upgrade Handbook, a $12 119 page PDF (no DRM!) e-book that runs through the ins and outs of bringing a Rails 2.x application up to Rails 3.0 standards.

Forgetting the 6 pages of cover and contents, Jeremy's Rails 3 Upgrade Handbook is 113 pages of awesome. The Rails 2 and Merb journey to Rails 3 is covered at a high level to start things off, but you're soon brought down to actually getting your Rails application upgraded to Rails 3.0. There are a few freely available blog posts out there that cover some of the topics this e-book looks at, but if you want a single "how to upgrade a Rails 2.x app to Rails 3.0" guide in one, and without any hassle, the Rails 3 Upgrade Handbook is a must buy.

Want to get a basic feel for how it looks? Jeremy has a PDF with some sample pages, but here are a couple of screengrabs too.. you should see it's a slick production:

$12 though? Is everyone just selling products nowadays? Well.. Jeremy first contacted me a week ago to get my impressions of the book and talk about pricing. He was first considering selling it at around $20 but I suggested he lower the price point - not because it's not worth $20 but because it's useful enough that everyone should feel good about buying it. Jeremy went lower than even my suggestion, though, so $12 it is.

If you're interested in Rails 3 and have experience with Rails 2, however, this thing is a good buy at $12 - it'll save you at least $20 of time's worth crawling through the documentation and 101 blog posts, though of course, you can still do that!

If you really want to get value for money out of Jeremy, though, you should also check out his Humble Little Ruby Book. It's free (readable online or as a PDF) and makes a great introduction to Ruby, ideal to pass on to your colleagues, kids, or whoever. If anyone's earned the karma to actually sell a product for once, it's this guy!

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Rails Magazine Issue 5 Available (Free) »

Created at: 04.01.2010 02:46, source: Rails Inside, tagged: books Elsewhere News

Rails Magazine editor Olympiu Metiu has let us know that the fifth issue of Rails Magazine is now available for free in PDF format. If you're not familiar with the magazine, check out our video review of the first issue to get a feel for what it's about.