Learn Ruby programming - 64th batch

Registrations are now open for RubyLearning’s long-running and popular Ruby programming course. This is an intensive, online course for beginners that helps you get started with Ruby programming. The course starts on Saturday, 5 December 2015 and runs for seven weeks. Course Fee and Discount Please create a new account first and then pay US $44.95 by clicking on the PayPal button Note: If you do not have a PayPal account and would like to pay by credit card on PayPal then do email me at satish [at] rubylearning.org.

Learn Ruby The Hard Way: A Book Review

A book review of Learn Ruby the Hard Way - Third Edition.
Review by: RubyLearning’s mentor Victor Goff.
Book author: Zed A. Shaw.
Publisher: Addison-Wesley

Do You Know How To Use cURL

Downloading and installing cURL

cURL is available on many platforms, including Windows (all variants), OSX (all versions) and Linux (all distros). cURL is available from the cURL website at http://curl.haxx.se/.

RubyLearning Tutorial Translated To Arabic

Ali Osm is young Libyan programmer, and started programming in 2011.

In 2014 he saw the Ruby programming language and liked it, and so he decided to create the Ruby3arabi.com site and he hopes to help Ruby language to become popular in the Arabic programmers community. Here is Ali Osm telling us about what is going on.

Comment Types in Ruby

There are basically two types of comments in Ruby. And they work the same.

Ruby Wizardry - A Book Review

It all starts at the beginning.

It really is a whimsical story, about a kingdom in some trouble because of some mischievous hooligans and how this kingdom is saved by, well, you will have to read it to see.

Meet Volt: a Promising Ruby Framework for Dynamic Applications

By Amaury Andres Peniche Gonzalez – Software Engineer at Toptal

Amaury is a systems and production engineer with experience in front and back-end development, computer graphics, and networking. Amaury currently works as a freelance Ruby engineer at Toptal, where he was involved in numerous projects, mainly related to Ruby on Rails.

Felipe Elias Philipp Winner RPCFN - 1 (Reprint)

Note: This article first appeared on 8th Oct. 2009 but the original is not accessible; hence the reprint. In this brief interview, Satish Talim of RubyLearning talks to Felipe Elias Philipp of Brazil, winner of the first-ever Ruby Programming Challenge For Newbies. Satish Welcome Felipe and thanks for taking out time to share your thoughts. For the benefit of the readers, could you tell us something about your self? Felipe Thanks Satish for the opportunity.

RPCFN: Average Arrival Time For A Flight - 2 Reprint

Note: This article first appeared on 8th Oct. 2009 but the original is not accessible; hence the reprint. Ruby Programming Challenge For Newbies RPCFN: Average Arrival Time For A Flight (#2) By Chris Strom Thank you for the very encouraging response to the first-ever “Ruby Programming Challenge For Newbies (RPCFN)“. The second Ruby challenge is from Chris Strom. About Chris Strom Chris Strom (twitter / blog) in his day job, is the Director of Software Engineering for mdlogix, a small company in Baltimore, Maryland.

RPCFN: Ruby Programming Challenge For Newbies (Reprint)

RPCFN: Ruby Programming Challenge For Newbies Note: This article first appeared on 20th Sept. 2009 but the original is not accessible; hence the reprint. After a very encouraging response to our poll from YOU, the readers of the RL blog, RL is happy to announce the first-ever fortnightly (every 14 days) “Ruby Programming Challenge For Newbies (RPCFN)” that starts on Friday, 25th Sept. 2009. What Is The RPCFN? The RPCFN is a fortnightly (every 14 days) programming challenge for Ruby Newbies in the spirit of the Ruby Quiz.

RPCFN: Shift Subtitle Reprint

Ruby Programming Challenge For Newbies RPCFN: Shift Subtitle (#1) By Fabio Akita Note: This article first appeared on 24th Sept. 2009 but the original is not accessible; hence the reprint. After a very encouraging response to our poll from YOU, the readers of the RL blog, RL is happy to announce the first-ever fortnightly ( bi-weekly / every 14 days) “Ruby Programming Challenge For Newbies (RPCFN)” in Ruby. Thanks to YOU, the Ruby community, people like Fabio Akita and companies like Locaweb who make all of this possible.

What are the Twelve Rules of Sinatra? (Reprint)

Note: This article first appeared on 19th July. 2009 but the original is not accessible; hence the reprint. The Twelve Rules of Sinatra The Twelve Rules of Sinatra: Download this as a Free Report. Recently, I was reading Scott Adams’ (of Dilbert fame) blog post “Rule of Twelve” where he stated: The Rule of Twelve states that if you know twelve concepts about a given topic you will look like an expert to people who only know two or three.

Poll: Ruby Problems for Beginners and Prizes (Reprint)

Note: This article first appeared on 13th Sept. 2009 but the original is not accessible; hence the reprint. Poll: Ruby Problems for Beginners and Prizes Many RubyLearning participants wrote in asking RubyLearning to start a weekly post containing a problem to be solved using Ruby. A problem will be posted here every week / fortnight and anyone is free to offer their solution (the solution should be clear-cut, follow Ruby conventions and still be easy to understand) as a comment to the blog post.

Corey Donohoe: How do I learn and master Sinatra?

Note: We are re-printing this blog post that appeared on 6th July 2009, as the original post is not accessible. Welcome to the first installment on the RL blog, of a mini series – “How do I learn and master Sinatra?” – by top Rubyists using Sinatra. The interview series will provide insight and commentary from these notable Sinatra developers, with the goal of facilitating and providing answers to the questions Ruby beginners face on how to learn and master Sinatra.

20+ Rubyists are using Sinatra - Do you? (Reprint)

Note: This first appeared on 29th June 2009 and is being reprinted as the original is not accessible. 20+ Rubyists are using Sinatra – Do you? With Sinatra you can quickly create your own tiny web-applications in Ruby and write lots of small services. RubyLearning caught up with some Rubyists working with Sinatra and asked them as to why, how and where they use Sinatra. Aaron Quint>> I’ve been using Sinatra all over the place.

Follow 10+ Rubyists using Sinatra on Twitter (Reprint)

Note: This first appeared on 24th June 2009 and is being reprinted as the original is not accessible. What’s Twitter? The New York Times says: Twitter is a simple messaging service that you’ve either heard about a lot or not at all. Either way, it’s a fun and useful tool, well worth trying if you want to reach potential and existing customers, employees or employers. List of Rubyists Using Sinatra This list of over 10 Rubyists using Sinatra, is in alphabetical order, with a link to their Twitter profile.

Interview: Aaron Quint on Sinatra (Reprint)

Note: This article first appeared on 20th March 2009 but the original is not accessible; hence the reprint. On the eve of the first ever online “Introduction to Sinatra” course, Satish Talim of RubyLearning caught up with Aaron Quint and talked to him on Sinatra, in this interview. Satish Talim Welcome, Aaron and thanks for taking out time to share your thoughts. For the benefit of the readers, could you tell us something about your self?

Karel Minarik: How do I learn and master Sinatra? (Reprint)

Note: This is reprint of the blog post that appeared on 13th July 2009, as the original is not accessible. Welcome to the fourth installment on the RL blog, of a mini series – “How do I learn and master Sinatra?” – by top Rubyists using Sinatra. The interview series will provide insight and commentary from these notable Sinatra developers, with the goal of facilitating and providing answers to the questions Ruby beginners face on how to learn and master Sinatra.

RubyConf India : Hospitality was anything but pleasant at The Lalit resort and spa, Goa

This is a re-post of my original blog post here. RubyConfIndia 14 – Hospitality was anything but pleasant at The Lalit resort and spa, Goa. We had a pretty bitter experience and would like to capture it here. Also please suggest me where else we can do this. Send us email at team@rubyconfindia.org RubyConf India We are a not-for-profit conference run by community support. The only thing special about us is that we run a pretty high quality conference in pretty hotels.

Why Australia is Becoming an IT Leader

The Wonderful Tech Wizards of Oz Photo by David Jackmanson / Flickr   The Information and Communication Technology sector is the fifth highest paying career group in Australia, with entry salaries starting at $88,000 and median salaries of $100,000. This ranking is both because of, and contributes to, Australia’s growing IT leadership. Over 50 software companies are listed on the Australian Stock Exchange.   The growth of technology centers created by governmental planners and business networks, such as the Bentley Technology Park in Western Australia (adjacent to Curtin University of Technology), the Digital Harbour at Docklands in Melbourne, and the Macquarie Park in Sydney (including the Research Park and Macquarie University), combined with respected universities and the roll-out of the National Broadband Network, all demonstrate the IT successes of the Aussies!

My articles on Go for JoshSoftware

Here are some articles I have written on Go for JoshSoftware, a company that is now into Go projects too. My experience at the awesome, first-ever GopherCon 2014 – link A Fun, Weather Forecast Go Web App – link Fun with Gmail and Go – link Learn to build and deploy simple Go Web Apps, Part Four – link Learn to build and deploy simple Go Web Apps, Part Three – link Learn to build and deploy simple Go Web Apps, Part Two – link Learn to build and deploy simple Go Web Apps, Part One – link How Do I Create A Presentation Using Go?

Little Functional Programming Lexicon

This guest post is by Elise Huard, who is working as a freelance software engineer. She has 15 years of software under her belt and is keen on providing experienced advice as well as coding help. She has programmed in Ruby for 6 years before turning to Clojure and Haskell, and enjoys exploring the world of functional programming.

Routing Basics: Ruby on Rails for Front-End Developers

Routing Basics: Ruby on Rails for Front-End Developers This guest post is by Miles Matthias, who in between trips and sips, usually with planes and bourbon, enjoys talking to people about difficult challenges and tapping on his keyboard to help solve them. He moved to Boulder in January of 2012, after meeting his future wife and picking up degrees in Computer Science and Information Assurance in Omaha, Nebraska. Boulder was his ninth move after growing up in Virginia, Kansas, Illinois, and Indiana, and would be more than happy if Colorado became his permanent home.

From Lousy to Beautiful

This guest post is by James Schorr, who has been developing software since 1999. He is the owner of an IT consulting company, Enspiren IT Consulting, LLC. He lives with his lovely wife, Tara, and their children in Kansas City, Missouri. James spends a lot of time writing code in many languages, doing IT security audits, and has a passion for Ruby on Rails in particular. He also loves spending time with his family, playing chess, going to the shooting range, hiking, fishing, and investing.

Sinatra and Google Currency API - Part 2

Sinatra and Google Currency API – Part 2 This guest post is by Girish Sonawane, a self-taught programmer. He came across Ruby in 2008 and has since been working full-time on Ruby. He worked as a Rails freelancer and later co-founded Cube Root, an exclusive Ruby on Rails software boutique catering to outsourced work. His interests are everything related to technology or science. You can reach him at girish@cuberoot.in or via twitter @girishso.

Sinatra and Google currency API - Part 1

Sinatra and Google currency API – Part 1 This guest post is contributed by Girish Sonawane, a self-taught programmer. He came across Ruby in 2008 and has since been working full-time on Ruby. He worked as a Rails freelancer and later co-founded Cube Root, an exclusive Ruby on Rails software boutique catering to outsourced work. His interests are everything related to technology or science. You can reach him at girish@cuberoot.in or via twitter @girishso.

Sinatra: Some Questions from Ruby Newbies

Darren Jones in his excellent book Jump Start Sinatra says “Since its release in 2007, Sinatra has quickly gained in popularity in the Ruby web community due to its elegant simplicity and classy syntax. Everybody who uses it falls in love with its elegant simplicity and classy syntax.” RubyLearning will be conducting a “free” (i.e. pay if you like) online course on Sinatra from 7th Sept. 2013 and many of the would-be participants (mostly Ruby newbies) would have a plethora of questions related to Sinatra.

How The Course Works

Here are some details on how the course works Important: Once the course starts, you can login and start with the lessons any day and time and post your queries in the forum under the relevant lessons. Someone shall always be there to answer them. Just to set the expectations correctly, there is no real-time ‘webcasting’. Methodology: The Mentors shall give you URL’s of pages and sometimes some extra notes; you need to read through.

Do you know how to create a bot in Ruby?

This guest post is by Apoorv Saxena. He’s a Ruby Enthusiast, and has been coding in Ruby since 2009. In his free time, he builds hacks using Ruby and JavaScript; latest being Advanced Search for Facebook. He likes to blog about Sinatra, Ruby, Digital Marketing and Programming concepts.

Learn More About India's Exciting RubyConfIndia 2013

Learn More About India’s Exciting RubyConfIndia 2013 This guest post is by Prakash Murthy. Prakash is a Ruby programmer, working as a freelance web developer, splitting time between India and US, and currently based in Mysore. He discovered Ruby/Rails in early 2010 when he was looking to become a full-time programmer after more than a decade in a customer support role in the financial services software field, and has thrived in his chosen path ever since.

How do I benchmark Ruby code?

This guest post is by Jesse Storimer. Hes the author of Working With Unix Processes, a gentle introduction to Unix system programming for Ruby programmers. Jesse has been programming Ruby since joining

7 secrets every developer should know before getting into a manager or lead

7 secrets every developer should know before getting into a manager or lead role This guest post is contributed by Pramod Paranjape, who till recently ran a diverse delivery team of IT engineers and managers. He writes articles for new managers at ConverSight.com. He actively contributes on Quora on topics like team management and IT outsourcing. He releases slide decks based on real life management case studies on slideshare. At some point of time in your career, you have to decide if you want to continue on a technical path or to take up a management role.

Ruby Matrix, the Forgotten Library

Ruby Matrix, the Forgotten Library This guest post is contributed by Matthew Kirk, who is a partner at Modulus 7, specializing in software development and strategy. The basis of his career has been around utilizing science to improve businesses. He has spoken at technology conferences around the world and in his spare time, he enjoys traveling and adding to his 2000+ vinyl record collection. Remember matrices from math class? No not the movie, but the rectangular array of numbers.

What's Rack

A Quick Introduction to Rack – SATISH TALIM Copyright 2013 Satish Talim What’s Rack? In the words of the author of Rack – Christian Neukirchen: Rack aims to provide a minimal API for connecting web servers supporting Ruby (like WEBrick, Mongrel etc.) and Ruby web frameworks (like Rails, Sinatra etc.). Web frameworks such as Sinatra are built on top of Rack or have a Rack interface for allowing web application servers to connect to them.

All about Struct

All about Struct This guest post is by Steve Klabnik. Steve is a Rubyist, writer, and teaches Ruby and Rails classes with Jumpstart Lab. He maintains Draper, Hackety Hack, and Shoes, and\ contributes to Rails from time to time. One of my favorite classes in Ruby is Struct, but I feel like many Rubyists don’t know when to take advantage of it. The standard library has a lot of junk in it, but Struct and OStruct are super awesome.

Minimal I18n with Rails 3.2

This guest post is by Fabio Akita, also known as akitaonrails. He is a known Brazilian Ruby Activist and has been the program chairman for Rubyconf Brazil 2012 for the last 5 years. He also co-founded Codeminer 42, a software boutique specialized in taking care of outsourced work from fledgling startups that need great Rails developers. Fabio has been publicly evangelizing Ruby, Rails and agile techniques since 2006 and has talked around 100 times in conferences around the globe.

The Ongoing Vigil of Software Security

The Ongoing Vigil of Software Security This guest post is by James Schorr, who has been developing software since 1999. He is the owner of an IT consulting company, Enspiren IT Consulting, LLC. He lives with his lovely wife, Tara, and their children in Kansas City, Missouri. James spends a lot of time writing code in many languages, doing IT security audits, and has a passion for Ruby on Rails in particular.

Book Review: Exploring Everyday Things with R and Ruby

A book review of Exploring Everyday Things with R and Ruby. Review by: RubyLearning’s mentor Victor Goff. Book author: Sau Sheong Chang. Publisher: O’Reilly Media. I got the opportunity to review Exploring Everyday Things with R and Ruby by Sau Sheong Chang and published by O’Reilly Media.1 This book, as expected, talks about R and Ruby. The first chapters cover Ruby at an introductory level. In the first chapter, after showing how you can install Ruby and an introduction to the basics of Ruby, he also provides “a quick introduction to Shoes, a simple but powerful UI toolkit for Ruby”2, with installation suggestions and sample code.

Ruby in 2012

Ruby is more popular than ever, but it's also not as trendy as it used to be. rubylearning.com students1 asked a few questions to Matt Aimonetti about his vision of Ruby in 2012 and for the future. Matt Aimonetti is a well-known Rubyist, technical writer, speaker and active open-source contributor. He currently works as a software architect for LivingSocial. Prior to joining LivingSocial, Matt worked for Sony PlayStation. How does Ruby fit in with the future, as you see it?

Migration downtime for RubyLearning

Migration downtime for RubyLearning RubyLearning websites and services (http://rubylearning.com/, http://rubylearning.org/ and http://satishtalim.com/) will be down for scheduled maintenance according to this time schedule. We would be offline no longer than 4 hours. During this time, we will be migrating our Slice from the St. Louis (STL) to the Chicago (ORD) datacenter of Slicehost. Update: The site migration is complete. Thank you for your understanding and patience.

The 5 Most Popular Articles of 2011 on RubyLearning

(Based on Twitter Re-tweets) The year 2011 saw RubyLearning’s awesome guest authors write and share their knowledge with others. If you missed any of these useful articles then here’s the roundup of the 5 most popular articles of 2011 on RubyLearning. Enjoy! Throw, Catch, Raise, Rescue… I’m so confused! Avdi Grimm explains the usage of Throw, Catch, Raise, Rescue in the Ruby programming language. You’ve probably noticed that Ruby has throw and catch… but they don’t seem to be used the way you’re used to in other languages!

Let's Talk About Conditional Expressions

This guest post is by Evan Light a test-obsessed developer, the author of several rarely used gems, and the curator of Ruby DCamp. When he’s not a talking head at conferences, he’s usually working at home as a freelance developer remotely mentoring a developer, working for one or more startups, playing with open source, keeping his wife and four cats company, hacking nonsensically, talking at people on the internet, and/or attempting to lose weight (or any combination of the above).

Rubyists and Companies I am thankful for in 2011

As 2011 comes to a close, I would like to thank the following awesome people and companies. Special mention: Yukihiro Matsumoto for inventing the Ruby programming language (I finally had the honor of meeting Matz in person in Singapore this year), Fabio Akita for his constant encouragement and positive support for RubyLearning, Jim Pryke who maintained all my sites on SliceHost, Michael Kohl who is a mentor at RubyLearning, Satoshi Asakawa who teaches the Ruby Shoes and Metaprogramming courses on RubyLearning, Victor Goff who teaches the Ruby programming course on RubyLearning and now maintains all my sites on SliceHost, Gautam Rege and Sethupathi Asokan of Josh Software Pvt.

Do you ponder what to name things in your code?

This guest post is by Evan Light a test-obsessed developer, the author of several rarely used gems, and the curator of Ruby DCamp. When he’s not a talking head at conferences, he’s usually working at home as a freelance developer remotely mentoring a developer, working for one or more startups, playing with open source, keeping his wife and four cats company, hacking nonsensically, talking at people on the internet, and/or attempting to lose weight (or any combination of the above).

Questions on Ruby? Ask An Expert at RubyLearning

Questions on Ruby? Ask An Expert at RubyLearning RubyLearning is happy to announce the start of a series of blog posts titled “Ask An Expert”. We are assembling experts in various areas of Ruby programming who will answer your questions as a blog post here. To begin with, some of the experts who have agreed to answer your questions are: Gautam Rege on Ruby with MongoDB, Mongo, MongoMapper and Mongoid Gonçalo Silva on Ruby/Rails performance Sau Sheong Chang on Sinatra Sethupathi Asokan on the Ruby devise gem Staffan Nöteberg on Ruby regex Steve Klabnik on Testing in Ruby I am sure there are more Ruby experts to follow.

My Ruby Book now available in .mobi and .epub formats

My Ruby Book now available in .mobi and .epub formats My Ruby book has been available since 2006 in .pdf format. It’s now available, completely updated for Ruby 1.9, in .mobi and .epub formats. The Ruby eBook covers Ruby 1.9 and has all the Core Ruby programming topics on the RubyLearning.com site. This Ruby eBook, is the ideal companion for students in the Online Ruby Class at RubyLearning.org and provides an overview of Ruby programming.

Do you know Ruby Doctest?

This guest post is by Victor Goff, who enjoys mentoring Ruby at RubyLearning.org since 2008.

Do you know how to write an internal DSL in Ruby?

Almost all Ruby programming newbies would love to get their hands wet writing a Ruby DSL. This article explains how you can write a simple Ruby DSL. Introduction A Domain-Specific Language (DSL) is a (usually small) programming or description language designed for a fairly narrow purpose. DSLs are targeted at end users or domain specialists who are not expert programmers. Martin Fowler classifies DSLs into two styles – external and internal.

How do I use Sinatra to access the Google+ API?

How do I use Sinatra to access the Google+ API? RubyLearning is conducting many free, online courses on Google+. Some participants wanted an answer to their question “How do I use Sinatra to access the Google+ API?” This blog post explains the same. Read on. Pre-requisite Install Sinatra, Git, Heroku, Bundler Refer RubyLearning’s article on Google+. Create a folder on your hard disk Create a folder sinatragplus. This is where we will store our Sinatra app.

How do I run a Sinatra app using JRuby?

How do I run a Sinatra app using JRuby? RubyLearning is conducting a free, online JRuby 101 course – the first of its kind, on Google+ Some participants wanted an answer to their question “How do I run a Sinatra app using JRuby?” This blog post explains the same. Read on. Pre-requisite I have a Windows XP box but the following should work on Mac and Linux-based computers too. Ensure that you have already installed JDK 6, JRuby and set the relevant system environment variables path, classpath, JAVA_HOME and JRUBY_HOME.

Performance Testing Rails Applications: How To?

Performance Testing Rails Applications: How To? This guest post is by Gonçalo Silva, who is a full-time Ruby on Rails developer at escolinhas.pt and has participated in the Ruby Summer of Code 2010. He loves and contributes to many open-source projects, being a fan of Linux, Ruby and Android. He likes to call himself a hacker, but that’s just an excuse for being in front of the computer all the time.

Top 3 Posts for July 2011 on RubyLearning

(Based on Google Analytics) In case you missed them, here’s the roundup of the Top 3 posts for July 2011 on RubyLearning. Enjoy! 1. Throw, Catch, Raise, Rescue… I’m so confused! Avdi Grimm explains the usage of Throw, Catch, Raise, Rescue in the Ruby programming language. One of the aspects of Ruby that often confuses newbies coming from other languages is that it has both throw and catch and raise and rescue statements.

How do I test my code with Minitest?

How do I test my code with Minitest? This guest post is by Steve Klabnik, who is a software craftsman, writer, and former startup CTO. Steve tries to keep his Ruby consulting hours down so that he can focus on maintaining Hackety Hack and being a core member of Team Shoes, as well as writing regularly for multiple blogs. Programming is an interesting activity. Everyone has their favorite metaphor that really explains what programming means to them.

How Can We Develop For Tomorrow's Needs?

How Can We Develop For Tomorrow’s Needs? This guest post is by James Schorr, who has been developing software since 1999. He is the owner of an IT consulting company, Enspiren IT Consulting, LLC. He lives with his lovely wife, Tara, and their children in Kansas City, Missouri. James spends a lot of time writing code in many languages, doing IT security audits, and has a passion for Ruby on Rails in particular.

Why don't you use and review these useful Ruby Gems?

Showcasing some Ruby Gems from developers like you and me Why don’t you try out some of the Ruby Gems mentioned below, built by developers like you and me, and review them? Maybe there are some real ‘hidden’ gems out there, wanting to be exposed! ascii-data-tools developed by Jake Benilov. In his own words – “It provides a suite of tools for identifying, reading, enriching and editing ASCII data records. Such records are commonly used for data transfer within the banking (e.g.

Cryptography Or: How I Learned to Stop Worrying, and Love AES

Cryptography Or: How I Learned to Stop Worrying, and Love AES This guest post is by Phillip Gawlowski, who is living in the German wilderness of Oberberg near Cologne. Phillip spends his time writing Ruby as a hobby just for fun. He tries to make life a little easier for himself and for others when he is crazy enough to release his code as open source. He’s neither famous nor rich, but likes it that way (most of the time).

Throw, Catch, Raise, Rescue- I'm so confused!

Throw, Catch, Raise, Rescue… I’m so confused! This guest post is by Avdi Grimm, who is the author of “Exceptional Ruby“, an in-depth guide to exceptions and failure handling in Ruby. RubyLearning readers can get a $3 discount on the book by using code RUBYLEARN. Avdi has been hacking Ruby code for 10 years, and is still loving it. He is chief aeronaut at ShipRise, a consultancy specializing in sustainable software development and in helping geographically dispersed teams work more effectively.

20+ Rubyists to Follow on Google+

Google+ What’s Google+ ? Google+, pronounced “Google plus” is a new social network from Google. The service, which is initially available to a select group of Google users who will soon be able to invite others, will let people share and discuss status updates, photos and links, much as they do on Facebook. A list of Rubyists Using Google+ RubyLearning has compiled this list of over 20 Rubyists, in alphabetical order, with a link to their Google+ profile.

How do I smell Ruby code?

How do I smell Ruby code? Understanding the worst of code This guest post is by Timon Vonk, who is a self-employed Ruby enthusiast and standard nerd with an edge. He has worked with Ruby for several years, but is well-known with many other (programming) languages. Also likes martial arts, loud music, varying quantities of booze and a good scotch. Introduction Writing bad code isn’t a bad thing. Not understanding the problem you’re trying to solve any better after having written that piece of code is.

Interview: Michael Hartl, author of the Ruby on Rails Tutorial (railstutorial.org)

RubyLearning participants talk to Michael Hartl the author of the Ruby on Rails Tutorial (railstutorial.org). Satish Talim Welcome Michael and thanks for taking out time for RubyLearning. For the benefit of the readers of this blog could you please introduce yourself and tell us what you do for a living? Michael Happy to be here. I’m a programmer, educator, and entrepreneur. Recently, I’ve been focused on making educational products and selling them online.

Rails Drinkup Pune – Jan 28th

Rails Drinkup Pune – Jan 28th It’s that time again. Rails Drinkup will be in Pune, India on Jan. 28th and we’re doing a drinkup at the Royal Connaught Boat Club. If you want some free beer, be there at or around 6 pm. We shall have 1 or 2 technical sessions (like “Rhodes in a Nutshell”) followed by networking. The Drinkup is sponsored by IntelleCap. The earlier Drinkup sponsored by JoshSoftware was a big success.

Ruby on Rails Engineer at Tupalo.com

Ruby on Rails Engineer at Tupalo.com Tupalo.com is one of Austria’s fastest growing privately held internet startups, creating a local search community where millions of people review and share the best local businesses around the World every month. Tupalo.com is looking for Ruby on Rails engineers to join their development team full-time in Vienna, Austria. You should enjoy building scalable, high-performing web services and love all things web, especially location-based services.

20+ Rubyists to Follow on Quora

What’s Quora? Quora is a continually improving collection of questions and answers created, edited, and organized by everyone who uses it. The most important thing is to have each question page become the best possible resource for someone who wants to know about the question.” Robert Scoble, in his article “Is Quora the biggest blogging innovation in 10 years?” says - I’ve now been blogging for 10 years. Looking back we haven’t seen all that much innovation for bloggers.

How do I make a command-line tool in Ruby?

How do I make a command-line tool in Ruby? This guest post is by Allen Wei, who works as Senior Ruby On Rails Engineer for Seravia, in Beijing. He is very enthusiastic about Ruby. He started using Ruby after several years of using Java, .NET and never came back to them. When he has some spare time, he develops Ruby gems, holds tech sessions, and shares his experience in his blog.

The 5 Most Popular Articles of 2010 on RubyLearning

(Based on Twitter Re-tweets) The year 2010 saw RubyLearning’s awesome guest authors write and share their knowledge with others. If you missed any of these useful articles then here’s the roundup of the 5 most popular articles of 2010 on RubyLearning. Enjoy! Do You Enjoy Your Code Quality? James M. Schorr gives real-world tips on how to enjoy crafting software by improving the quality of your code and your development habits.

Being Awesome with the MongoDB Ruby Driver

This guest post is by Ethan Gunderson, who is a software developer living in Chicago. By day he is a developer at

How do I keep multiple Ruby projects separate?

How do I keep multiple Ruby projects separate? This guest post is by Steve Klabnik, who is a software craftsman, writer, and former startup CTO. Steve tries to keep his Ruby consulting hours down so that he can focus on maintaining Hackety Hack and being a core member of Team Shoes, as well as writing regularly for multiple blogs. If you’re anything like me, you’re already starting a new project immediately after wrapping up the last one.

Rubyists and Companies I am thankful for in 2010

As 2010 comes to a close, I would like to thank the following awesome people and companies.

Getting started with Heroku

Getting started with Heroku This guest post is by Ben Scofield, who is Heroku’s developer advocate, responsible for listening to the tens of thousands of developers deploying their Ruby applications to the cloud. He’s spoken at many conferences around the world, and in 2010 became the co-chair for RailsConf. Introduction Heroku has been in the news a lot lately, and it’s been a popular choice for Ruby application developers for a few years.If you haven’t worked with it before, here’s your chance — it’s designed to be as painless as possible to get going, and to give a powerful, stable, and scalable platform for your code.

RubyLearning eBook(s) Sale Proceeds for CRY India -- Will You Join Me?

This month, RubyLearning completes five wonderful years of teaching Ruby programming and allied technologies. Time flies when you’re having fun!

Ruby gems — what, why and how

Ruby gems — what, why and how

This guest post is by Gonçalo Silva, who is a full-time Ruby on Rails developer at escolinhas.pt and has participated in the Ruby Summer of Code 2010. He loves and contributes to many open-source projects, being a fan of Linux, Ruby and Android. He likes to call himself a hacker, but that’s just an excuse for being in front of the computer all the time. Oh, and he tweets at @goncalossilva.

My Ruby Regrets

My Ruby Regrets

This guest post is by Jeff Langr, who has developed software for thirty years, mastering many other languages (including Smalltalk, C++, Java, and currently C#), but just not Ruby and Python… yet. (Ever?) He owns the consulting and training company

How do I build DSLs with yield and instance_eval?

This guest post is by Michael Bleigh, a Rubyist developing web applications and more for Intridea from his hometown of Kansas City. He is a prolific member of the open-source and Ruby communities, releasing such projects as

How does one effectively combine Ruby with Git for source control?

This guest post is by Erik Andrejko, a software developer living in San Francisco who spends his days working on web applications and solving data mining and machine learning problems

Don't Know Metaprogramming In Ruby?

This guest post is by Gavin Morrice, Managing Director of Katana Code Ltd., a software boutique based in Edinburgh, Scotland. He likes sharing Rails tips

Does Ruby Have Too Many Equality Tests?

Does Ruby Have Too Many Equality Tests? This guest post is by Eric Anderson, who develops web-based applications for small businesses though his company Pixelware, LLC in Atlanta, GA. He also runs SaveYourCall.com which allows people to record phone calls from any phone without the need for any complicated hardware. You probably started using == out of habit from other languages. It seems to work and that seems good enough. But then you might start seeing ===, =~, eql?

Why Use Single Sign-in Solutions in Rails?

Why Use Single Sign-in Solutions in Rails? This guest post is by Omar A. Mekky, a software developer living in Cairo, Egypt. His interests are every thing related to technology, sports or science. He is a partner in Mash Ltd. in Egypt and enjoys writing about Rails from time to time. Contact Omar at cousine.me or via twitter @cousine. Single sign-in solutions are becoming all popular and practical today. In this article we will see how we can approach this problem by building a simple restful provider and consumer using Authentasaurus on Rails.

Do YOU know Resque?

How does your code smell?

How does your code smell? This guest post is by Dr. Kevin Rutherford, a UK-based agile/XP coach, developer and project leader, with over 25 years experience in software development. He is also the founder of AgileNorth and XP-Manchester. Contact him via http://www.kevinrutherford.co.uk. I expect you’re a conscientious modern developer. You write your code using test-driven or behaviour-driven development, and you never write a line of production code unless it is needed in order to make a test pass.

Do You Understand Ruby's Objects, Messages and Blocks?

This guest post is by Ed Howland, an independent consultant who has worked in Ruby and RoR for more than 5 years, since the 0.13 days of Rails. He has over 22 years in the software development industry

Do you know what's new in Ruby 1.9?

This guest post is by Carlo Pecchia, who is an IT engineer mainly interested on agile methodologies and “good practices” for developing large and complex systems. He is also interested in web architectures and emerging programming languages.

The value of a personal bug log

The value of a personal bug log This guest post is by Brian Tarbox, who is a Distinguished Member of Technical Staff at Motorola where he works on Video On Demand Systems. He also blogs about applying a Wabi Sabi approach to software, cognition and philosophy at briantarbox.blogspot.com. He is a regular contributor to the Pragmatic Programmer magazine. His open source project for converting computer log files to music just won an Oracle Duke’s Choice award.

Do You Enjoy Your Code Quality?

This guest post is by James Schorr, who has been developing software since 1999. He is the owner of an IT consulting company, Enspiren IT Consulting, LLC.  He lives with his lovely wife, Tara, and their children in Kansas City, Missouri. James spends a lot of time writing code in many languages, doing IT security audits, and has a passion for Ruby on Rails in particular. He also loves

Let The World Know Who YOU Are!

Let The World Know Who YOU Are! I am connected with awesome people across the globe thanks to my RubyLearning sites and social networking websites like Facebook, LinkedIn and Twitter. I would love to learn about what you do. Please take a moment to introduce yourself and tell us more about yourself. Feel free to talk about your job or business and promote yourself here. Let us know in the comments section of this post.

Cloning Internet Applications with Ruby by Chang Sau Sheong

Cloning Internet Applications with Ruby by Chang Sau Sheong Cloning Internet Applications with Ruby is a new Ruby book by Chang Sau Sheong and published by Packt Publishing. It’s now for sale at \$34.12 at Amazon. In India, it’s available at a special price of Rs. 837.25. This book is for those interested in and with some experience with web applications. The interesting thing is that the author describes four well-known applications and shows you not only how to implement each one, but describes different concerns about each type of application.

Hampton Catlin on Haml

Does ROR deployment deprive YOU of your sleep?

This guest post is contributed by Fabio Akita, who works as Project Manager for GoNow Tecnologia, in Brazil, leading Ruby on Rails projects. He worked for Locaweb, the largest web hosting company in Latin America where he helped implement the support for Rails in a shared web hosting for the first time. He and Locaweb also joined forces to create the

Do YOU know Ruby's "Chainsaw" method?

This guest post is contributed by Paolo Perrotta, a freelance geek, currently coaching agile teams for a large phone company. He also wrotes

Gem Sawyer, Modern Day Ruby Warrior

An Introduction to Outside-in Development

This guest post is contributed by Harold Giménez, who is a web developer with the crew at thoughtbot, where he spends his days working with Rails and writing open source software. He’s also involved with

Ruby Forensics

This guest post is contributed by Elise Huard, who is based in Brussels, Belgium and is the owner of

An introduction to eventmachine, and how to avoid callback spaghetti

This guest post is contributed by Martyn Loughran, who works at New Bamboo in London where he builds some very cool apps like

RPCFN: Japanese Mosaic Problem - 14

Ruby Programming Challenge For Newbies

RPCFN: Japanese Mosaic Problem (#14)

– By Joseph Wilk

About Joseph Wilk

Joseph
Wilk Joseph Wilk is a member of the core development team for Cucumber. He has been developing for the web for over 10 years

The Testing Mindset

This guest post is contributed by Noel Rappin, who is a Senior Consultant with Obtiva, and has been a professional web developer for a dozen years. He is the author of four technical books. The most recent, Rails Test Prescriptions

An Introduction to Desktop Apps with Ruby

This guest post is contributed by Martin Sadler, who has over 10 years experience in the web development industry working with a range of successful high profile businesses, public sector organisations, and individuals. He is best known in the Ruby community as the creator of

The Ruby movement

This guest post is contributed by Matt Aimonetti, a Senior Engineer at Sony Playstation in San Diego, CA. Matt has been active in the Ruby community for many years, he developed or contributed to a lot OSS libraries and frameworks, spoke at users groups and conferences in the U.S. and abroad. Working with startups, fortune 100 companies and traditional companies, he had the opportunity

Win a Prize by Telling us about Your Top 3 Most Useful Ruby Gems

Today I’d like to try something a little different on the blog and open up a topic for some discussion. This one could cause some ‘energetic’ conversation but I’d love to do an informal poll on it anyway.

Almost everything is an object (and everything is almost an object!)

This guest post is contributed by David A. Black, a Senior Developer with Cyrus Innovation, Inc. David has been programming in Ruby for ten years, and is the author of

So, you're new to Ruby!

This guest post is contributed by Javier Cicchelli, a Software Engineer at Rock & Code, the Software and Marketing communications shop that rocks! Currently, they are doing their dirty deeds and conducting their high voltage operations in the (in)famous Red Light District in Amsterdam, The Netherlands. Some four years ago, he started developing all the symptoms of a peculiar case of programmer’s schizophrenia. It all happened when

Incorporating Web APIs to spark computer programming exercises

This guest post is contributed by Karmen Blake, who is a software developer for Wildfireapp, focused on creating apps to better help companies integrate branded interactive campaigns with viral features of the social web. Karmen has over 10 years of experience in software development

14 Ways To Have Fun Coding Ruby

This guest post is contributed by Jeff Schoolcraft, who runs The Queue Incorporated a freelance consultancy that provides custom software development in Ruby, Rails and iOS. He produces screencasts with his partner, Istvan Hoka, at BDDCasts. When he’s not building his business he’s trying to keep up with

Writing modular web applications with Rack

Writing modular web applications with Rack

This guest post is contributed by Sau Sheong Chang, who is currently the Director of the Applied Cloud Computing Lab, in HP Labs Singapore.

How to Learn Ruby (or any programming language)

This guest post is contributed by Geoffrey Grosenbach, who designs, produces, and publishes the acclaimed

Ruby Gurus to blog on RubyLearning

Ruby Gurus to blog on RubyLearning

RubyLearning is happy to announce that the following Ruby Gurus would be individually writing a guest blog post here starting 20th Sept. 2010. The focus of the blog post would be towards Ruby Newbies. These gurus are:

Programming Challenge for Newbies in Clojure and Python too?

Programming Challenge for Newbies in Clojure and Python too? RubyLearning has been conducting the monthly Ruby Programming Challenge for Newbies for over a year now and so far 12 challenges have been completed. The 13th challenge is in progress. All this was possible due to the extensive support we got from Rubyists across the world. Also, you all indicated that we continue with these challenges in the months to come. Recently, my colleague Dhananjay Nene posted a Python based solution to the 13th Ruby challenge.

RPCFN: Economics 101 - 13

Ruby Programming Challenge For Newbies RPCFN: Economics 101 (#13) – By Dr. Bruce Scharlau About Dr. Bruce Scharlau In Dr. Bruce’s own words: “I’ve been using and teaching Ruby since trying out the cookbook example in the summer of 2006. As soon as I saw how much easier it all was with Ruby and Rails, I was hooked. I now try to do as much with Ruby as I can with my teaching and own work.

Ruby Programming and Education: A Match Made in Heaven

Ruby programming has received much attention in the past decade or so, especially with the advent of Ruby on Rails in 2005. While the blogosphere is abuzz with the latest on Ruby, let’s ask ourselves how, exactly, Ruby programming is conducive to an educational environment

Do YOU want us to continue with the Ruby Challenge for Newbies?

RubyLearning has been conducting the monthly Ruby Programming Challenge for Newbies for over a year now and so far 11 challenges have been completed. The 12th Challenge is in progress. All this was possible due to the extensive support we got from Rubyists across the world.

RPCFN: Cycle Tracks - 12

Ruby Programming Challenge For Newbies

RPCFN: Cycle Tracks (#12)

– By David Griffiths

Today, we complete one year of Ruby Programming Challenge for Newbies. RubyLearning is grateful to all the Ruby experts and participants who have actively helped make these challenges interesting and popular.

Clojure: A Chat with Andrew Boekhoff

In this brief interview, Satish Talim of RubyLearning talks to Andrew Boekhoff, author of CongoMongo, a toolkit for using MongoDB with Clojure. Satish>> Welcome Andrew and thanks for taking out time to share your thoughts. What programming languages have you used seriously? Andrew>> Seriously: Ruby and Clojure. Less Seriously: C, C++, Java and now: Haskell, Scheme. Satish>> Why and when did you decide to start working on Clojure? Andrew>> I’ve been using Clojure for a little over a year.

Clojure Tips from the Experts

RubyLearning wrote to a lot of experts, gathering their best tips on Clojure. The tips are still coming in, but here are some to get you started with. Feel free to add your own tips in the comments section or send the same to satishtalim [at] gmail.com. Enjoy! Antonio Cangiano Find him on Twitter. His Blog. When learning a new programming language, I find Project Euler to be an invaluable source of self-contained, increasingly more challenging exercises.

Popular Posts on Clojure from RubyLearning

Many Rubyists today are talking about and exploring Clojure and I wanted to share a list of some popular posts on Clojure from RubyLearning. Enjoy! Rich Hickey Stuart Halloway Michael Fogus Amit Rathore Andrew Boekhoff Clojure Tips from the Experts. And hopefully more to come…

ROR based websites made by Indian companies

As a sequel to my post Indian Ruby on Rails Portfolio, I am compiling a list (in alphabetical order of company names) showcasing ROR based websites made by Indian companies. I’ll be updating this page from time to time. If you are the owner / developer of such a website(s), then I would appreciate if you would send me by email (satish [dot] talim [at] gmail.com), as much information about the same.

RubyLearning Associates and Participants on Twitter and Facebook

RubyLearning Associates and Participants on Twitter and Facebook

RubyLearning is associated with some amazing, talented people these last 5 years. I am compiling a list (in alphabetical order) showcasing them; people who have either undergone some of the courses at RubyLearning or have been instrumental in taking RubyLearning to the next level.

Dmitry Lipovoi Winner RPCFN - 10

RPCFN: The Game of Life - 11

Ruby Programming Challenge For Newbies RPCFN: The Game of Life (#11) By Elise Huard About Elise Huard Elise Huard is based in Brussels, Belgium and is the owner of Jabberwocky, a solutions company mostly focused on Rails. She has worked with a few other technologies before falling in love with Rails and Ruby about 3 years ago and going freelance to work with Ruby full time. She contributes to open source projects as much as she can, and has given talks at a few Ruby and Rails conferences.

Benoit Daloze Winner RPCFN - 9

In this brief interview, Satish Talim of RubyLearning talks to Benoit Daloze of Belgium, winner of the ninth Ruby Programming Challenge For Newbies. Satish>> Welcome Benoit and thanks for taking out time to share your thoughts. For the benefit of the readers, could you tell us something about your self? Benoit>> I would first like to thank RubyLearning for all they have done. I am a 19 year old student in first bachelor in computer sciences (at UCL, Louvain-la-Neuve).

RPCFN: Business Hours - 10

Ruby Programming Challenge For Newbies RPCFN: Business Hours (#10) By Ryan Bates About Ryan Bates Ryan Bates has been involved in web development since 1998. In 2005 he started working professionally with Ruby and Rails and is now best known for his work on Railscasts, the free Ruby on Rails screencast series. Ryan has this to say about the challenge: Sometimes when working in a structured framework environment such as Rails it is easy to forget about the fundamentals of Ruby and how to organize code.

Book Promotion: The Joy of Clojure

Book Promotion: The Joy of Clojure

RubyLearning is pleased to announce the promotion of the book “The Joy of Clojure” by author Michael Fogus and Chris Houser.

Paul Barry Winner RPCFN - 8

RPCFN: Interactive Fiction - 9

Ruby Programming Challenge For Newbies RPCFN: Interactive Fiction (#9) – By Avdi Grimm About Avdi Grimm Avdi Grimm is a husband, father, software cultivator living in southern Pennsylvania, USA. He has been been working with the Ruby language for almost ten years, and is still finding new reasons to love it. He is the author of NullDB, Hammertime, AlterEgo, HookR and numerous other Rubygems and has contributed code to Gemcutter, UtilityBelt, the DataMapper/SimpleDB adapter, and other projects.

20+ Clojurians to Follow on Twitter

What’s Clojure?

Clojure

According to Wikipedia: “Clojure is a modern dialect of the Lisp programming language. It is a general-purpose language supporting interactive development that encourages a functional programming style, and simplifies multithreaded programming.

RPCFN: XML Transformer - 8

Ruby Programming Challenge For Newbies RPCFN: XML Transformer (#8) – By Jamie van Dyke About Jamie van Dyke Jamie van Dyke has been using Ruby and Rails since the beginning of 2005, has contributed significantly to the Rails documentation and code base, as well as running his own Rails business and being responsible for building Engine Yard’s European support team. Jamie is now the CTO over at Boxedup. Jamie has this to say about the challenge: This challenge is ideal for both beginner and advanced users.

Dmitriy Nagirnyak Winner RPCFN - 7

Rich Hickey talks to RubyLearning's Clojure Course Participants

On the eve of the first free, online “Clojure 101” course, Michael Kohl of RubyLearning caught up with Rich Hickey, the creator of Clojure. In this interview, Rich Hickey talks to the Clojure 101 course participants on Clojure. Michael>> Welcome, Rich and thanks for taking out time for RubyLearning’s Clojure course participants. For their benefit, could you tell us something about yourself? Rich>> I’m an independent professional software developer, and the author of Clojure.

Amit Rathore talks to RubyLearning's Clojure Course Participants

On the eve of the first free, online “Clojure 101” course, Michael Kohl of RubyLearning caught up with Amit Rathore, author of the forthcoming book – Clojure in Action. In this interview, Amit Rathore talks to the Clojure 101 course participants on Clojure. Michael>> Welcome, Amit and thanks for taking out time for RubyLearning’s Clojure course participants. For their benefit, could you tell us something about yourself? Amit>> I’ve been programming since I was 11, and been designing and developing software systems in a professional setting for about ten years now.

Michael Fogus talks to RubyLearning - Clojure Course Participants

On the eve of the first free, online “Clojure 101” course, Michael Kohl of RubyLearning caught up with Michael Fogus, author of the forthcoming book

Stuart Halloway talks to RubyLearning's Clojure Course Participants

On the eve of the first free, online “Clojure 101” course, Michael Kohl of RubyLearning caught up with Stuart Halloway, author of

Guillaume Petit Winner RPCFN - 6

In this brief interview, Satish Talim of RubyLearning talks to Guillaume Petit of France, winner of the sixth Ruby Programming Challenge For Newbies. Satish>> Welcome Guillaume and thanks for taking out time to share your thoughts. For the benefit of the readers, could you tell us something about your self? Guillaume>> Thanks Satish for the opportunity. My name is Guillaume Petit a 26 year old nomad who sets off on a journey in the world of programming languages and has not come back yet!

RPCFN: Broadsides - 7

Ruby Programming Challenge For Newbies RPCFN: Broadsides (#7) – By James Edward Gray II About James Edward Gray II James Edward Gray II was called into the principal’s office in high school for writing a black jack program on his calculator and beaming it to all the math students almost 20 years ago. He’s been tinkering with little code challenges ever since. After discovering Ruby, he formalized this process by creating the Ruby Quiz.

Showcasing RubyLearning's Awesome Rubyists

Showcasing RubyLearning’s Awesome Rubyists

RubyLearning has been associated with some amazing, talented Rubyists these last 5 years. I am compiling a list (in alphabetical order) showcasing these awesome Rubyists who have either undergone some of the courses at RubyLearning or have been instrumental in taking RubyLearning to the next level.

Indian Ruby on Rails Portfolio

Indian Ruby on Rails Portfolio

I am compiling a list (in alphabetical order) showcasing Indian websites made with Ruby on Rails. Hat Tip: Fabio Akita

RPCFN: Fair Distribution - 6

Ruby Programming Challenge For Newbies RPCFN: Fair Distribution (#6) – By John Trupiano About John Trupiano John Trupiano (twitter) is the co-founder of SmartLogic, the premiere Ruby development team in Baltimore, Maryland. He is an active member in the technology and business communities in the mid-Atlantic region. He is highly involved with the local Ruby user group (Bmore on Rails) and recently organized the first ever Maryland TechCrawl, a show and tell event showcasing the exciting and innovative technologies being developed in the region.

Patrick McKenzie Winner RPCFN - 5

Shorty Awards: Honoring The Best People and Organizations on Twitter

“Hollywood has the Oscars. Broadway has the Tonys. Now Twitter has the…Shorty Awards” – The New York Times

The second annual Shorty Awards nomination process has begun!

RPCFN: Mazes - 5

RubyLearning wishes all its readers and their friends and families a happy, healthy 2010. Thanks to everyone for the support and encouragement this year. It’s been a fun and rewarding year and we do appreciate all that you contribute to this site.

Ruby eBook Sale Proceeds for HelpAge India - Will You Join Me?

Today when I logged onto my computer a Calendar notification popped up at me telling me that it has been 4 wonderful years of Ruby programming for me. Time flies when you’re having fun!

Aleksey Gureiev Winner RPCFN - 4

Happynerds - Programming Links for Kids

Rubyists and Companies I am thankful for in 2009

This year, I would like to thank the following companies and rubyists.

RPCFN: Ruby**Fun 4

Ruby Programming Challenge For Newbies RPCFN: Ruby**Fun (#4) By Michael Kohl About Michael Kohl Michael Kohl (Twitter / blog) in his day job, works as an IT systems engineer in Vienna, Austria. He fell in love with Ruby in 2003 or so, maintained various Ruby-related packages for Gentoo Linux from 2004-2006 and started being an assistant teacher for RubyLearning.org in early 2009. Besides all things Ruby his interests include mathematics, literature, travelling, foreign languages, (functional) programming languages (e.g.

Todd Huss Winner RPCFN - 3

Rubyists.EU: Stairway to the European Ruby Community Integration

RPCFN: Short Circuit - 3

Ruby Programming Challenge For Newbies RPCFN: Short Circuit (#3) – By Gautam Rege About Gautam Rege Gautam Rege (twitter / blog) is based in Pune, one of the busiest IT hubs in India. He has done his computer engineering from Pune Institute of Computer Technology (PICT) and passed out in the year 2000. After working for a few services based companies like Zensar and Cybage he got exposure to product companies like Veritas (now Symantec).

Charles Feduke Winner RPCFN - 2

Felipe Elias Philipp Winner RPCFN - 1

RPCFN: Average Arrival Time For A Flight - 2 repost

Ruby Programming Challenge For Newbies RPCFN: Average Arrival Time For A Flight (#2) – By Chris Strom Thank you for the very encouraging response to the first-ever “Ruby Programming Challenge For Newbies (RPCFN)“. The second Ruby challenge is from Chris Strom. About Chris Strom Chris Strom (twitter / blog) in his day job, is the Director of Software Engineering for mdlogix, a small company in Baltimore, Maryland. They develop software that manages clinical research trials and associated data.

Cookie-based Sessions in Sinatra

Rails Summit Latin America 2009

Rails Summit Latin America
2009

Back in 2005 there was virtually no Ruby community in Brazil. David Hansson himself was there, at the FISL conference, showcasing a pre-1.0 Rails (which later became the famous 15-min blog screencast). Only 3 years later the community grew

RPCFN: Shift Subtitle 1

Ruby Programming Challenge For Newbies RPCFN: Shift Subtitle (#1) – By Fabio Akita After a very encouraging response to our poll from YOU, the readers of the RL blog, RL is happy to announce the first-ever fortnightly ( bi-weekly / every 14 days) “Ruby Programming Challenge For Newbies (RPCFN)” in Ruby. Thanks to YOU, the Ruby community, people like Fabio Akita and companies like Locaweb who make all of this possible.

Ruby Programming Challenge for Newbies FAQ

What Is The Ruby Programming Challenge For Newbies (RPCFN)? The RPCFN is a monthly programming challenge for Ruby Newbies in the spirit of the Ruby Quiz. A new RPCFN will be posted on the RubyLearning blog every 1st of the month (normally). The contest is open to individuals only and you are invited to contribute solution(s) and/or discussion(s) as comments to the respective blog post. All solutions posted would be hidden to allow users to come up with their own solutions.

RPCFN: Ruby Programming Challenge For Newbies

After a very encouraging response to our poll from YOU, the readers of the RL blog, RL is happy to announce the first-ever fortnightly (every 14 days) “Ruby Programming Challenge For Newbies (RPCFN)” that starts on Friday, 25th Sept. 2009. What Is The RPCFN? The RPCFN is a fortnightly (every 14 days) programming challenge for Ruby Newbies in the spirit of the Ruby Quiz. A new RPCFN will be posted on this RubyLearning blog every alternate Friday, starting 25th Sept.

Poll: Ruby Problems for Beginners and Prizes

Many RubyLearning participants wrote in asking RubyLearning to start a weekly post containing a problem to be solved using Ruby. A problem will be posted here every week / fortnight and anyone is free to offer their solution (the solution should be clear-cut, follow Ruby conventions and still be easy to understand) as a comment to the blog post. A small panel will evaluate the solutions received and decide the best amongst them all.

Interview: Author Peter Cooper

Our Book Promotion: “Beginning Ruby 2nd Edition” starts soon. Win one of four books to be given out for active participation. The coolest thing?

Book Promotion: Beginning Ruby 2nd Edition

RubyLearning is pleased to announce the promotion of the book “Beginning Ruby 2nd Edition” by author Peter Cooper.

Blake Mizerany: How do I learn and master Sinatra?

Welcome to the last installment on the RL blog, of a mini series – “How do I learn and master Sinatra?” – by top Rubyists using Sinatra. The interview series will provide insight and commentary from these notable Sinatra developers, with the goal of facilitating and providing answers to the questions Ruby beginners face on how to learn and master Sinatra.

Carlos Gabaldon: How do I learn and master Sinatra?

Welcome to the eight installment on the RL blog, of a mini series – “How do I learn and master Sinatra?” – by top Rubyists using Sinatra. The interview series will provide insight and commentary from these notable Sinatra developers, with the goal of facilitating and providing answers to the questions Ruby beginners face on how to learn and master Sinatra. Satish>> Carlos Gabaldon, could you tell us something about yourself – your background, where you are based?

Julio Javier Cicchelli: How do I learn and master Sinatra?

Welcome to the seventh installment on the RL blog, of a mini series – “How do I learn and master Sinatra?” – by top Rubyists using Sinatra. The interview series will provide insight and commentary from these notable Sinatra developers, with the goal of facilitating and providing answers to the questions Ruby beginners face on how to learn and master Sinatra.

What are the Twelve Rules of Sinatra?

Jeremy Evans tells us his thoughts on

Nick Plante: How do I learn and master Sinatra?

Welcome to the sixth installment on the RL blog, of a mini series – “How do I learn and master Sinatra?” – by top Rubyists using Sinatra. The interview series will provide insight and commentary from these notable Sinatra developers, with the goal of facilitating and providing answers to the questions Ruby beginners face on how to learn and master Sinatra.

Chris Strom: How do I learn and master Sinatra?

Welcome to the fifth installment on the RL blog, of a mini series – “How do I learn and master Sinatra?” – by top Rubyists using Sinatra. The interview series will provide insight and commentary from these notable Sinatra developers, with the goal of facilitating and providing answers to the questions Ruby beginners face on how to learn and master Sinatra.

Interview: Author Antonio Cangiano

Our Book Promotion: “Ruby on Rails for Microsoft Developers” has just started. Win one of four books to be given out for active participation. The coolest thing?

Karel Minarik: How do I learn and master Sinatra?

Welcome to the fourth installment on the RL blog, of a mini series – “How do I learn and master Sinatra?” – by top Rubyists using Sinatra. The interview series will provide insight and commentary from these notable Sinatra developers, with the goal of facilitating and providing answers to the questions Ruby beginners face on how to learn and master Sinatra.

Graham Ashton: How do I learn and master Sinatra?

Welcome to the third installment on the RL blog, of a mini series – “How do I learn and master Sinatra?” – by top Rubyists using Sinatra. The interview series will provide insight and commentary from these notable Sinatra developers, with the goal of facilitating and providing answers to the questions Ruby beginners face on how to learn and master Sinatra.

Jeremy Evans: How do I learn and master Sinatra?

Welcome to the second installment on the RL blog, of a mini series – “How do I learn and master Sinatra?” – by top Rubyists using Sinatra. The interview series will provide insight and commentary from these notable Sinatra developers, with the goal of facilitating and providing answers to the questions Ruby beginners face on how to learn and master Sinatra.

Book Promotion: Ruby on Rails for Microsoft Developers

Book Promotion: Ruby on Rails for Microsoft Developers RubyLearning is pleased to announce the promotion of the book “Ruby on Rails for Microsoft Developers” by author Antonio Cangiano. The general idea of a book promotion is that it gives the participants a chance to ask relevant questions, interact with the author of the book and in the process possibly win a copy of the book, all for free! Here are the details: Promotion Period: 14 to 16 July 2009.

How do I learn and master Sinatra?

Welcome to the first installment on the RL blog, of a mini series – “How do I learn and master Sinatra?” – by top Rubyists using Sinatra. The interview series will provide insight and commentary from these notable Sinatra developers, with the goal of facilitating and providing answers to the questions Ruby beginners face on how to learn and master Sinatra.

Interview: Author Paolo Perrotta

The trial batch of our new course “Ruby Metaprogramming” started recently. On this occasion, RubyLearning caught up with author Paolo Perrotta (who is writing the book “Metaprogramming Ruby“)

20+ Rubyists are using Sinatra - Do you?

20+ Rubyists are using Sinatra – Do you? With Sinatra you can quickly create your own tiny web-applications in Ruby and write lots of small services. RubyLearning caught up with some Rubyists working with Sinatra and asked them as to why, how and where they use Sinatra. Aaron Quint I’ve been using Sinatra all over the place. With Vegas I’ve been using it as a way to provide simple web interfaces to existing code.

Follow 10+ Rubyists using Sinatra on Twitter

What’s Twitter? The New York Times says: Twitter is a simple messaging service that you’ve either heard about a lot or not at all. Either way, it’s a fun and useful tool, well worth trying if you want to reach potential and existing customers, employees or employers. List of Rubyists Using Sinatra This list of over 10 Rubyists using Sinatra, is in alphabetical order, with a link to their Twitter profile.

Want to create a Sinatra Web Service?

With Sinatra you can quickly create your own tiny web-applications in Ruby and write lots of small services. Problem definition To upload a text file to a Sinatra web service and have its sorted content returned. How to upload a file from the command line? We shall use cURL, a tool and library designed to give you a user-friendly but low-level interface to making HTTP requests. cURL also supports many other protocols related to uploading and downloading files.

Interview: Author Gregory Brown

Our Book Promotion: “Ruby Best Practices” starts soon. Win one of four books to be given out for active participation. The coolest thing? Author Gregory Brown will be on site to answer questions! Click here for more details. Here, in this brief interview, Satish Talim of RubyLearning talks to Gregory Brown. Satish Gregory, could you tell us something about yourself – your background, where you are based? Gregory I’m a Ruby hacker that tends to spend a lot of time on free software.

Book Promotion: Ruby Best Practices

Book Promotion: Ruby Best Practices RubyLearning is pleased to announce the promotion of the book “Ruby Best Practices” by author Gregory Brown. The general idea of a book promotion is that it gives the participants a chance to ask relevant questions, interact with the author of the book and in the process possibly win a copy of the book, all for free! Here are the details: Promotion Period: 30 June to 2 July 2009.

Interview: Author Eldon Alameda

Our Book Promotion: “Foundation Rails 2” starts soon. Win one of four books to be given out for active participation. The coolest thing? Author Eldon Alameda will be on site to answer questions! Click here for more details. Here, in this brief interview, Satish Talim of RubyLearning talks to Eldon Alameda. Satish Eldon, could you tell us something about yourself – your background, where you are based? Eldon I’m originally from California, but have been residing in Kansas City for the last 11 years.

A Quick Chat with Chetan Mittal of Mortar Systems

Satish Chetan, could you tell us something about yourself – your background, where you are based? Chetan I am born and raised in Chandigarh, India’s most beautiful city. I am a computer engineer by both qualification and profession, and a MBA from Melbourne Business School (UQ/MtEliza). In 2000 I moved to Australia; worked and stayed there for six years before coming back to India in 2006, year I put my hands on Rails, to start Mortar Systems.

Book Promotion: Foundation Rails 2

Book Promotion: Foundation Rails 2 RubyLearning is pleased to announce the promotion of the book “Foundation Rails 2” by author Eldon Alameda. The general idea of a book promotion is that it gives the participants a chance to ask relevant questions, interact with the author of the book and in the process possibly win a copy of the book, all for free! Here are the details: Promotion Period: 16th to 18th June 2009.

Interview: Author David Black

Our Book Promotion: “The Well-Grounded Rubyist” starts today. Win one of four books to be given out for active participation. The coolest thing? Author David A. Black will be on site to answer questions! Click here for more details. Here, in this brief interview, Satish Talim of RubyLearning talks to David A. Black. Satish David, could you tell us something about yourself – your background, where you are based? David I’m from Connecticut originally, and I live in New Jersey.

The Future of Ruby is Fail!

The Future of Ruby is Fail! Preamble Thanks to Ilya Grigorik for initiating the discussion in the Indian Ruby / Rails community around the premise “Future of Ruby is Fail” (yes, somewhat tongue in cheek, but also serious), trying to get a feel for the concerns in the community. The focus of this discussion would be on the Indian market / geographical area. RubyLearning is pleased to have with us, Ruby / Rails Gurus from Pune, India: Ashutosh Ambekar from Persistent Systems Ltd., Devendra Deshmukh from e-Zest, Gautam Rege from Josh Software Pvt.

10+ Ruby Rails companies in Pune, India

10+ Ruby Rails companies in Pune, India NOTE: In Aug. 2014, we have updated this list. Are you looking out for companies in India, working in Ruby, Rails, Merb and / or Sinatra to out-source your projects? Here’s a list of companies in Pune, India working with Ruby and frameworks like Rails, Merb and Sinatra. BetterLabs (Contact Person: Vaibhav Domkundwar), is located in San Jose, USA and Pune, India. BetterLabs is an unique product incubation firm that works on early stage concepts to experiment, validate, and iterate on the concept to take it from idea to company.

Book Promotion: The Well-Grounded Rubyist

RubyLearning is pleased to announce the promotion of the book “The Well-Grounded Rubyist” by author David Black.

Interview: Author Dave Thomas

Our Book Promotion: “Programming Ruby 1.9” starts soon. Win one of four books to be given out for active participation. The coolest thing?

Book Promotion: Programming Ruby 1.9

Book Promotion: Programming Ruby 1.9 RubyLearning is pleased to announce the promotion of the book “Programming Ruby 1.9” by author Dave Thomas. The general idea of a book promotion is that it gives the participants a chance to ask relevant questions, interact with the author of the book and in the process possibly win a copy of the book; all for free! Here are the details: Promotion Period: 2nd to 4th June 2009.

Book Promotion: Head First Rails

RubyLearning is pleased to announce the promotion of the book “Head First Rails” by author David Griffiths.

Interview: Author David Griffiths

Our Book Promotion: “Head First Rails” starts soon. Win one of four books to be given out for active participation. The coolest thing?

Interview: Author Jeremy McAnally

Our Book Promotion: “Ruby in Practice” starts soon. Win one of four books to be given out for participation. The coolest thing?

Book Promotion: Ruby in Practice

RubyLearning is pleased to announce the promotion of the book “Ruby in Practice” by authors Jeremy McAnally and Assaf Arkin.

Book Promotion: Rails Test Prescriptions

RubyLearning is pleased to announce the promotion of the book “Rails Test Prescriptions” by author Noel Rappin.

Interview: Author Noel Rappin

Our second Book Promotion: “Rails Test Prescriptions” starts soon. Win one of four books to be given out for active participation. The coolest thing?

Quick Questions for Andrey 'A.I.' Sitnik

RubyLearning caught up with Andrey “A.I.” Sitnik developer of R18n, a tool to internationalize and localize your Merb/Sinatra/desktop Ruby application, and asked him some quick questions in this interview.

Follow Cost: A Sinatra app for Twitter

RubyLearning caught up with Luke Francl and Barry Hess creators of Follow Cost – a Twitter tool to help people decide if following someone is worth it, and talked to them about Follow Cost and Sinatra in this interview.

Interview: Author Steve Pugh

Our first ever Book Promotion: “Wicked Cool Ruby Scripts” starts soon. Win one of four books to be given out for participation. The coolest thing? Author Steve Pugh will be on site

Want to promote your book/product/event?

Want to promote your book/product/event? RubyLearning is pleased to announce that we shall be running book promotions on RubyLearning.org. This is probably the most powerful marketing you can do without giving us any money. For all the details, download our brochure. If you have something other than a book, don’t worry. We plan to do this for products, classes/courses and events too. The general idea is that we tell our members (via email) about your book/product/event (all must be related to Ruby in some way) and that we are giving one or more copies/tickets away.

SapnaSolutions Transforming Pune City into a Rails Hub

Nick Adams is the CTO and Co-Founder of SapnaSolutions. SapnaSolutions is on a mission of transforming Pune city into a Ruby on Rails hub.

RubyLearning's Sponsor: ProjectLocker

It’s time to thank RubyLearning’s sponsor – ProjectLocker. ProjectLocker provides tools and services to help software development teams quickly set up an enterprise-quality infrastructure at an affordable price. Using ProjectLocker, teams can spend less time finding, configuring, and managing tools and more time doing what is most important — writing great software to meet customer needs. ProjectLocker’s suite of software development tools features source control with both Git & Subversion hosting, and bug tracking, wiki, and project management with hosted Trac.

RubyLearning's Sponsor: Railsware

It’s time to thank RubyLearning’s sponsor – Railsware.

Railsware for premium-quality web
applications

Twitter, twitter! Are you twittering all around and nobody hears your sweet voice? That’s strange. Perhaps Twitter isn’t your marketing tool. However for

Interview: Aaron Quint on Sinatra

On the eve of the first ever online “Introduction to Sinatra” course, Satish Talim of RubyLearning caught up with Aaron Quint and talked to him on Sinatra, in this interview. Satish Talim>> Welcome, Aaron and thanks for taking out time to share your thoughts. For the benefit of the readers, could you tell us something about your self? Aaron Quint>> Thanks for having me! I’m a freelance Ruby developer working in Brooklyn, NY.

Interview: Ryan Tomayko on Sinatra

On the eve of the first ever online “Introduction to Sinatra” course, Satish Talim of RubyLearning caught up with Ryan Tomayko and talked to him on Sinatra, in this interview. Satish Talim>> Welcome, Ryan and thanks for taking out time to share your thoughts. For the benefit of the readers, could you tell us something about your self? Ryan Tomayko>> My background is in systems design and general web architecture — HTTP, REST, and “web services” primarily.

Can YOU suggest new course contents?

We’re rapidly expanding our course offerings here at RubyLearning, trying to keep up with the enormous and ever-growing interest in “everything” Ruby. We have recently introduced four new courses

RubyLearning's Sponsor: 1st Easy Limited

It’s time to thank RubyLearning’s sponsor – 1st Easy Limited. 1st Easy Limited for easy Sinatra apps hosting 1st Easy Limited are keen to play an active role in encouraging the adoption of new development technologies, and are delighted to have been given the opportunity to support the work of Satish Talim and his team at RubyLearning. If you’re a developer, or an alumni of RubyLearning and would like to test your own apps or freshly acquired skills, you’re welcome to take advantage of the free hosting trials that 1st Easy offer: simply visit the registration page and leave your details.

Interview - Michael Morin Creator of Using Twitter with Ruby Course

The first ever free, online “Using Twitter with Ruby” course starts 18th April 2009 at RubyLearning.org. Satish Talim of RubyLearning caught up with Micheal Morin, the creator of this course, and talked to him in this interview.

Interview: Adam Wiggins on Heroku

On the eve of the first ever online “Introduction to Sinatra” course, Satish Talim and Victor H. Goff III of RubyLearning caught up with Adam Wiggins and talked to him on Heroku (pronounced her-OH-koo), in this interview.

50+ Ruby-related Blogs to Read

I have compiled a list of over 50 Ruby-related blogs of Rubyists and companies, in alphabetical order. The list is not intended to be all-inclusive, but it should give you a great start to read the blogs of some very talented Rubyists.

RubyLearning's Sponsor: Rails Kits

It’s time to thank RubyLearning’s sponsor – Rails Kits.

Rails Kits is the place to get ready-to-use Rails code that will help you build your apps faster

RubyLearning's Sponsor: Blue Box Group

It’s time to thank RubyLearning’s sponsor – Blue Box Group.

This year is shaping up to be another big one for Blue Box Group

Blue Box Group has got some great new features for release, upgrades to their service offerings, appearances at various events and conferences and more. Check out their site and subscribe to their blog to get the latest updates!

RubyLearning's Sponsor Locaweb In The News

It’s time to thank RubyLearning’s excellent sponsor – Locaweb.0^ Locaweb is Growing real Fast! Locaweb has just made a big announcement this week. All web shared hosting plans now offer *unlimited* disk storage and bandwidth! It may not sound as big as it is if you’re from the US, for instance, but it is a pretty big deal if you’re from Latin America. There has been small attempts before by others but this is the move of the largest web hosting company in Brazil, which changes the rules of the game.

Interview: Adam Keys on Sinatra

On the eve of the first ever online “Introduction to Sinatra” course, Satish Talim of RubyLearning caught up with Adam Keys and talked to him on Sinatra, in this interview.

Who are the Top 5 Twitter Graded Rubyists?

Interview: Chris Wanstrath of GitHub

On the eve of the first ever free, online course on “Git and GitHub”, Satish Talim of RubyLearning caught up with Chris Wanstrath and talked to him, in this short interview. Satish Talim>> Welcome, Chris and thanks for taking out time to share your thoughts. For the benefit of the readers, could you tell us something about your self? Chris Wanstrath>> I’m a Ruby and JavaScript programmer living in San Francisco, CA.

Will RubyLearning be present at the Shorty Awards Acceptance Ceremony?

The votes have been cast and the Shorty Awards have come to an end. The official results are in, and RubyLearning is a winner of the Shorty Award in the education category. RubyLearning represented by its nearly 7000 participants from over 140 countries are delighted and so am I. For those of you unfamiliar with The Shorty Awards, they have been given to “the best producers of short content in 2008.” And by short content, they mean 140 characters or less.

Little Known Ways to Ruby Mastery by Ryan Bates

A weekly series from the Ruby Masters Welcome to the last installment of the weekly interview series on the RL blog – “Path to Ruby Mastery” – by top trainers and developers in the Ruby community, from across the globe. The interview series will provide insight and commentary from these notable Ruby trainers and developers, with the goal of facilitating and providing answers to the questions Ruby beginners face. This week, we’re happy to have Ryan Bates from USA.

Noomii.com: The Buddy System for your Life

Kurt
Shuster

Kurt Shuster is the CEO and Co-Founder of Noomii.com. In this interview Satish Talim of RubyLearning, talks to Kurt about Noomii.com.

Can YOU help RubyLearning win this award?

Hollywood has the Oscars. Broadway has the Tonys. Now Twitter has the Shorty Awards.

Little Known Ways to Ruby Mastery by Thibaut Barrere

A weekly series from the Ruby Masters Welcome to the next installment of the weekly interview series on the RL blog – “Path to Ruby Mastery” – by top trainers and developers in the Ruby community, from across the globe. The interview series will provide insight and commentary from these notable Ruby trainers and developers, with the goal of facilitating and providing answers to the questions Ruby beginners face. This week, we’re happy to have Thibaut Barrere from France.

Little Known Ways to Ruby Mastery by Josh Susser

A weekly series from the Ruby Masters Welcome to the next installment of the weekly interview series on the RL blog – “Path to Ruby Mastery” – by top trainers and developers in the Ruby community, from across the globe. The interview series will provide insight and commentary from these notable Ruby trainers and developers, with the goal of facilitating and providing answers to the questions Ruby beginners face. We welcome your suggestions for interviewees and questions.

Little Known Ways to Ruby Mastery by Ilya Grigorik

A weekly series from the Ruby Masters Welcome to the next installment of the weekly interview series on the RL blog – “Path to Ruby Mastery” – by top trainers and developers in the Ruby community, from across the globe. The interview series will provide insight and commentary from these notable Ruby trainers and developers, with the goal of facilitating and providing answers to the questions Ruby beginners face. We welcome your suggestions for interviewees and questions.

Little Known Ways to Ruby Mastery by Yehuda Katz

A weekly series from the Ruby Masters Welcome to the next installment of the weekly interview series on the RL blog – “Path to Ruby Mastery” – by top trainers and developers in the Ruby community, from across the globe. The interview series will provide insight and commentary from these notable Ruby trainers and developers, with the goal of facilitating and providing answers to the questions Ruby beginners face. We welcome your suggestions for interviewees and questions.

Matt Aimonetti: Why on earth would you ignore Merb?

If you were to ask me, I’d say that Merb has caught the fancy of Rubyists around the world and it’s not just hype. Recently RL conducted a poll on new course offerings where 1000 Rubyists (from over 140 countries) voted. Over 30% requested for an Introductory course on Merb. RL’s Satish Talim caught up with Matt Aimonetti (a serious Ruby addict and Merb core team member) to learn more about Merb.

Indian Rubyists to follow on Twitter

Not many Indian Rubyists tweet, but the numbers who do, is growing steadily. This list is a WIP and does not include all profiles, but it should give you a great start to following some talented Indian Rubyists. Ahmedabad SoftMind Technology – SoftMind Bangalore arjunram – arjunram karthik c – karthik c Piyush Gajjariya – piyushg Chandigarh Chetan Mittal – den1jay Hyderabad rootuser – rootuser Indore dharmarth – dharmarth Kochi jenishkottaram – jenishkottaram Tinu Cleatus – TinuCleatus Vasanth E.B.

Little Known Ways to Ruby Mastery by Peter Cooper

A weekly series from the Ruby Masters Welcome to the next installment of the weekly interview series on the RL blog – “Path to Ruby Mastery” – by top trainers and developers in the Ruby community, from across the globe. The interview series will provide insight and commentary from these notable Ruby trainers and developers, with the goal of facilitating and providing answers to the questions Ruby beginners face. We welcome your suggestions for interviewees and questions.

Top Ruby Merbists to follow on Twitter

In my opinion, Twitter is the easiest way for people new to social media to get involved. But What’s Twitter? The New York Times says: Twitter is a simple messaging service that you’ve either heard about a lot or not at all. Either way, it’s a fun and useful tool, well worth trying if you want to reach potential and existing customers, employees or employers. What’s a Ruby Merbist? The Merbist says: A Traditional Ruby Merbist is one who is trained or skilled in the dispensing of merbal prescriptions in the Rubyist tradition.

Little Known Ways to Ruby Mastery by Chris Matthieu

A weekly series from the Ruby Masters Welcome to the next installment of the weekly interview series on the RL blog – “Path to Ruby Mastery” – by top trainers and developers in the Ruby community, from across the globe. The interview series will provide insight and commentary from these notable Ruby trainers and developers, with the goal of facilitating and providing answers to the questions Ruby beginners face. We welcome your suggestions for interviewees and questions.

Little Known Ways to Ruby Mastery by Ezra Zygmuntowicz

A weekly series from the Ruby Masters Welcome to the next installment of the weekly interview series on the RL blog – “Path to Ruby Mastery” – by top trainers and developers in the Ruby community, from across the globe. The interview series will provide insight and commentary from these notable Ruby trainers and developers, with the goal of facilitating and providing answers to the questions Ruby beginners face. We welcome your suggestions for interviewees and questions.

Little Known Ways to Ruby Mastery by Bruce Tate

A weekly series from the Ruby Masters Welcome to the next installment of the weekly interview series on the RL blog – “Path to Ruby Mastery” – by top trainers and developers in the Ruby community, from across the globe. The interview series will provide insight and commentary from these notable Ruby trainers and developers, with the goal of facilitating and providing answers to the questions Ruby beginners face. We welcome your suggestions for interviewees and questions.

Little Known Ways to Ruby Mastery by Ian Dees

A weekly series from the Ruby Masters Welcome to the next installment of the weekly interview series on the RL blog – “Path to Ruby Mastery” – by top trainers and developers in the Ruby community, from across the globe. The interview series will provide insight and commentary from these notable Ruby trainers and developers, with the goal of facilitating and providing answers to the questions Ruby beginners face. We welcome your suggestions for interviewees and questions.

Can you help RubyLearning with your suggestions?

New Course Offerings We’re rapidly expanding our course offerings here at RubyLearning, trying to keep up with the enormous and ever-growing interest in Ruby. But we need your YOUR help because, as you know, Ruby is a big subject, and we’d like to be sure to focus in on the areas of most interest to you. A Note regarding the courses mentioned in the poll below: Ruby Testing and TDD: (starting from the concepts of testing in general, Test::Unit and other tools are discussed.

Little Known Ways to Ruby Mastery by Jonathan Conway

A weekly series from the Ruby Masters Welcome to the next installment of the weekly interview series on the RL blog – “Path to Ruby Mastery” – by top trainers and developers in the Ruby community, from across the globe. The interview series will provide insight and commentary from these notable Ruby trainers and developers, with the goal of facilitating and providing answers to the questions Ruby beginners face. We welcome your suggestions for interviewees and questions.

RubyLearning's Sponsor Locaweb on a High!

It’s time to thank RubyLearning’s excellent sponsor – Locaweb.1

Locaweb delivers Rails Summit Latin America 2008

The biggest news of October is that Locaweb was able to deliver Rails Summit Latin America 2008, the largest and the best Rails conference ever in Latin America.

Little Known Ways to Ruby Mastery by Guy Naor

A weekly series from the Ruby Masters Welcome to the next installment of the weekly interview series on the RL blog – “Path to Ruby Mastery” – by top trainers and developers in the Ruby community, from across the globe. The interview series will provide insight and commentary from these notable Ruby trainers and developers, with the goal of facilitating and providing answers to the questions Ruby beginners face. We welcome your suggestions for interviewees and questions.

50+ Rubyists to Follow on Twitter

The response to an earlier post “Famous Ruby Personalities: Who do you recommend?” was very encouraging and many wrote in asking for the Twitter profiles of these Famous Ruby Personalities and other Ruby developers and bloggers. But What’s Twitter? The New York Times says: Twitter is a simple messaging service that you’ve either heard about a lot or not at all. Either way, it’s a fun and useful tool, well worth trying if you want to reach potential and existing customers, employees or employers.

Little Known Ways to Ruby Mastery by Chris O'Sullivan

A weekly series from the Ruby Masters

Welcome to the next installment of the weekly interview series on the RL blog – “Path to Ruby Mastery” – by top trainers and developers in the Ruby community, from across the globe.

United Prosperity and Rails to Help Billions of Small Entrepreneurs

Bhalchander Vishwanath is the Founder and CEO of United Prosperity. He grew up in Pune, India and lives in the SF-Bay Area. He did his Bachelors degree from IIT Bombay and after working for two years with Tata Motors did his MBA from IIM Bangalore. He subsequently worked with Wipro, Microsoft, MphasiS and most recently Infosys and led several multi-year projects in financial services and insurance. Early in his career he also managed to do a little bit of marketing and sales.

Little Known Ways to Ruby Mastery by Jay Fields

A weekly series from the Ruby Masters Welcome to the next installment of the weekly interview series on the RL blog – “Path to Ruby Mastery” – by top trainers and developers in the Ruby community, from across the globe. The interview series will provide insight and commentary from these notable Ruby trainers and developers, with the goal of facilitating and providing answers to the questions Ruby beginners face. We welcome your suggestions for interviewees and questions.

Little Known Ways to Ruby Mastery by Stuart Halloway

A weekly series from the Ruby Masters Welcome to the next installment of the weekly interview series on the RL blog – “Path to Ruby Mastery” – by top trainers and developers in the Ruby community, from across the globe. The interview series will provide insight and commentary from these notable Ruby trainers and developers, with the goal of facilitating and providing answers to the questions Ruby beginners face. We welcome your suggestions for interviewees and questions.

Little Known Ways to Ruby Mastery by Dr Nic Williams

A weekly series from the Ruby Masters Welcome to the next installment of the weekly interview series on the RL blog – “Path to Ruby Mastery” – by top trainers and developers in the Ruby community, from across the globe. The interview series will provide insight and commentary from these notable Ruby trainers and developers, with the goal of facilitating and providing answers to the questions Ruby beginners face. We welcome your suggestions for interviewees and questions.

Little Known Ways to Ruby Mastery by James Edward Gray II

A weekly series from the Ruby Masters Welcome to the second installment of the weekly interview series on the RL blog – “Path to Ruby Mastery” – by top trainers and developers in the Ruby community, from across the globe. The interview series will provide insight and commentary from these notable Ruby trainers and developers, with the goal of facilitating and providing answers to the questions Ruby beginners face. We welcome your suggestions for interviewees and questions.

Famous Ruby Personalities: Who do you recommend?

Ruby is designed to make programmers happy Do we really care? Goggle for Famous Ruby Personalities and you will be surprised to find no relevant information on this. Let us try and addresses this issue and salute the Famous Ruby Personalities that have helped Ruby developers and enthusiasts have fun, joy and be happy while programming! Rock Stars Yukihiro Matsumoto or “Matz,” as he is known online, obviously is the first choice for giving us this wonderful Ruby programming language.

Little Known Ways to Ruby Mastery by Jamie van Dyke

A weekly series from the Ruby Masters We’re excited to launch a new interview series on the RL blog – “Path to Ruby Mastery” – by top trainers and developers in the Ruby community, from across the globe. The interview series will provide insight and commentary from these notable Ruby trainers and developers, with the goal of facilitating and providing answers to the questions Ruby beginners face. We welcome your suggestions for interviewees and questions.

BuildingWebApps is a resource site for Ruby on Rails developers that includes more than two dozen original articles, including Rails setup guides for Windows and Mac, as well as more than 1,000 links to the best resources from all around the web. It is also the home of the very popular Free Online Course on Ruby on Rails. I am including any news or developments the sponsor has had during August 2008.

In the News: RubyLearning's Sponsor FiveRuns

FiveRuns is a provider of Rails application (and server) monitoring services. I am including any news or developments the sponsor has had during August 2008.

Two things worth mentioning

RubyLearning's Sponsor Locaweb Rocks!

It’s time to thank RubyLearning’s excellent sponsor – Locaweb.1

Locaweb is Growing real Fast!

Locaweb is the biggest web hosting company in Brazil and is heading to become the largest in South America by a big margin. They are about to release their brand new

How can YOU take YOUR Ruby to the next level?

Today I will show you how to take YOUR Ruby to the next level, quick and easy. Join the brand new RubyLearning’s Online Intermediate Ruby Course (POIRPC101-1I) which will bridge the gap from learning basic or core Ruby, by providing what it takes to use some of the more advanced Ruby Libraries (Core, standard, and additional) and providing the technical skill to apply Ruby in our soon to be announced Advanced Ruby Course (which will cover such topics as: meta-programming, design patterns and best practices (OOD, TDD, BDD)).

Which 21 topics would YOU suggest for an Advanced Ruby Course and why?

There have been some heavy discussions at RubyLearning about what all should be covered in an Advanced Ruby Course. Many topics have been suggested along with a ‘for’ and ‘against’ each topic, but nothing concrete has come out. I’d like the topics to be more relevant to the ‘Real World Ruby‘ which any programmer with a basic knowledge of Ruby could master and use. At our Free Core Ruby Programming Course we cover the following topics.

TMail: Sending email

TMail is a commonly used library by the ActionMailer component of Ruby The students of the FORPC101 batch wanted to know how they could send an email in Ruby. Today, out of the various options available, we will have a quick look at TMail – a library used for composing and manipulating email messages for Ruby. TMail is designed to be an Request For Comments (RFC) compatible library. The goal of TMail is to allow you to create emails programatically without having to know about the RFCs or how they work, or what their standards are.

Thanks to RubyLearning Sponsor PeepCode

It’s time to thank RubyLearning’s excellent sponsors! PeepCode publishes cutting-edge screencasts and PDF books that get straight to the point. Thousands of people have learned quickly and visually about topics that matter. Check out recent content on writing Facebook Apps, Using Git, Keeping your Apps Secure, Using Email as an API and many other topics. Technorati Tags: PeepCode, Ruby, Sponsors

Thanks to RubyLearning Sponsor Locaweb

It’s time to thank RubyLearning’s excellent sponsors! Locaweb is the number 1 hosting company in Brazil, with around 400 employees and 133 thousand clients, hosting more than 220 thousand domains. I am including any news or developments the sponsor has had during July 2008. Locaweb just opened up the registration website for the greatest Ruby on Rails event in Latin America: Rails Summit Latin America. It is only in Brazilian Portuguese right now, but in the next few days they’ll release the international version so every other member of the Latin America community can register.

Thanks to RubyLearning Sponsor BuildingWebApps

It’s time to thank RubyLearning’s excellent sponsors! BuildingWebApps is a resource site for Ruby on Rails developers that includes more than two dozen original articles, including Rails setup guides for Windows and Mac, as well as more than 1,000 links to the best resources from all around the web. It is also the home of the very popular Free Online Course on Ruby on Rails. The instructors Michael Slater and Christopher Haupt are well-known speakers and highly experienced in their field of work.

Thanks to RubyLearning Sponsor FiveRuns

It’s time to thank RubyLearning’s excellent sponsors! FiveRuns is a provider of Rails application (and server) monitoring services. I am including any news or developments the sponsor has had during July 2008. Two things worth mentioning here are: They recently introduced DataFabric – a gem they wrote to help with ActiveRecord. One of the lingering issues they have had to deal with over the last year in the Manage service was ActiveRecord’s reluctance to talk to more than one database.

Advertise with us!

Advertising / Sponsorship

RubyLearning.org accepts advertising enquiries, although we like to handle advertising delicately to keep up a high standard.

Best of RubyLearning Posts for Ruby Beginners

Here’s a digest of RubyLearning’s best posts for Ruby beginners. These include (with the latest posts first): Advise: David Flanagan talks to RubyLearning David Flanagan is the author of the book “The Ruby Programming Language”. David says that his book was written to be a definitive book on the language, and is intended for those who want to learn and master the language. He also offers insights on Ruby 1.9. Charles Nutter talks to RubyLearning Participants Charles Nutter currently works full-time as a core developer on JRuby at Sun Microsystems.

Using ActiveRecord and JDBC with JRuby - Part 2

Part 2

Continuing from where we left off in Part 1

David Flanagan talks to RubyLearning

O’Reilly Media, Inc. is a strong supporter of RubyLearning.org and recently announced a 50% discount, for the participants of the FORPC101 course, on their book “The Ruby Programming Language” by David Flanagan, Yukihiro Matsumoto. Satish Talim of RubyLearning recently caught up with David Flanagan who was kind enough to spare time answering questions posed by RubyLearning. Satish Talim David, a warm welcome to you. For the benefit of the readers, could you tell us something about your self?

Using ActiveRecord and JDBC with JRuby

Preamble

The participants of the FORPC101 series of courses have been requesting me for a small article related to JRuby; so here it is.

Fabio Akita on Locaweb

Locaweb is a strong supporter of RubyLearning.org and Satish Talim of RubyLearning recently caught up with Fabio Akita of Locaweb, who was kind enough to spare time answering questions posed by RubyLearning. Fabio Akita is a Brazilian Rails enthusiast, also known online as “AkitaOnRails”. He regularly write posts on his own blog and had published the very first book tailored for the Brazilian audience called “Repensando a Web com Rails”. Satish Talim Fabio, a warm welcome to you.

Guy Naor CTO Morph Labs

Morph Labs have been supporting RubyLearning.org for some time now. Satish Talim of RubyLearning recently caught up with Guy Naor (CTO Morph Labs), who was kind enough to spare time answering questions posed by RubyLearning. Guy Naor is a veteran of the computing and technology world since 1981. Guy’s technology experience spans evolution and revolution eras, where he was involved with multiple companies and projects, working in a wide variety of computing platforms from mainframes to hand held devices as well as dozens of languages and operating systems.

Charles Nutter talks to RubyLearning Participants

On the eve of the new JRuby Course announced by RubyLearning, Satish Talim of RubyLearning caught up with Charles Nutter, who was kind enough to spare time answering questions posed by the RubyLearning participants. Charles Nutter has been a Java developer since 1996. He currently works full-time as a core developer on JRuby at Sun Microsystems. He led the open-source LiteStep project in the late 90s and started working on Ruby in the fall of 2004.

YoYoBrain.com: Study Less. Learn More.

Will Bunker founded the online dating service that became Match.com, the world’s largest personals site. Will designed the software and developed the hardware infrastructure for the site, which grew to 4.5 million monthly unique visitors and annualized subscription revenues of $14 million, outperforming Yahoo Personals and other competitors. In late 1999 they sold One-and-Only to Ticketmaster Online/City Search, where it was rebranded Match.com. Will Bunker is now the co-Founder and CEO of YoYoBrain.

A Teeny-weeny mp3 player using Ruby and Shoes

By Satoshi Asakawa Satoshi Asakawa is a Japanese Ruby enthusiast, a former student and now a Patron of the FORPC101 course. Shoes is a cross-platform, tiny graphics and windowing toolkit for the Ruby programming language written by Why. You can find more information on Shoes here. Objective: To build a teeny-weeny mp3 player. Step 1: Let us first download Shoes. We shall be using stable build file shoes-0.r396-curious.exe. Step 2: Next, we start writing the code for our teeny-weeny mp3 player.

Ruby Study Notes Book

The Ruby Study Notes eBook has been downloaded over 14500 times. For a long time there was a constant request of creating the Ruby Study Notes in print form and finally with the help of Lulu.com, I did it! With 1000s of participants at the Free Online Ruby Programming Course, many being from countries where the internet is painfully slow or those who do not have a continuous access to the internet; a printed book is always convenient.

"AkitaOnRails" Advises A Young Ruby Beginner

Fabio AkitaFabio Akita is a Brazilian Rails enthusiast, also known online as “AkitaOnRails”. He regularly write posts on his own blog and had published the very first book tailored for the Brazilian audience called “Repensando a Web com Rails”. He is now a full-time Ruby on Rails developer working as Brazil Rails Practice Manager for the Utah company Surgeworks LLC.

Some Security Concerns While Programming In Ruby

Making critical information available across the Internet has arguably been one of the most profound business enablers in the history of technology. It has meant expanded markets, increased productivity, and streamlined processes. Unfortunately, it has also meant a profound increase in operational risk. Vulnerabilities like command injection attacks result from inadequately designed or written Ruby code, creating opportunities for attackers to threaten privacy and steal data. The only way to eliminate vulnerabilities is to get them where they live: in the source code itself.

Yahoo! Web Services in Ruby

Jose Carlos Monteiro is a Portuguese Ruby enthusiast and a mentor at RubyLearning.org. He has over 11 years of experience in programming with languages such as C, C++, Delphi, Java, Perl, PHP. He is also familiar with coding Unix Shell Scripts and used to working with version control systems (CVS and Subversion). His short-term goal is to acquire new skills, such as becoming more experienced in working with “modern” build tools (rake) and continuous integration tools.

Looking for 1001 Ways to Promote my Ruby eBook

I have come up with some ideas. Some zany, impractical and okay maybe a bit stupid.. but some are simple, fun and easy to do. Will you help me come up with even more? Any idea is acceptable … this is just a fun brainstorming session <!–more-> to spread the book as far and as wide as it can go! Leave I am looking for ways to promote my Free Ruby eBook your comments below (you will have to register to do that…..which is safe, simple and allows you to make comments for other posts as well)..

Ruby Interview: Adam Keys of FiveRuns

For the past two years, RubyLearning has been promoting the Ruby language world-wide, by conducting its Free Online Ruby Programming Course. 1000s of participants have either completed or are in the process of completing the course. Most Ruby course participants have a plethora of questions related to the language; opportunities in Ruby; Ruby’s future etc. Satish Talim of RubyLearning, after talking to Bruce Williams, next talked to FiveRuns’ Adam Keys, to get his views and opinion.

Ruby Interview: Bruce Williams of FiveRuns

For the past two years, RubyLearning has been promoting the Ruby language world-wide, by conducting its Free Online Ruby Programming Course. 1000s of participants have either completed or are in the process of completing the course. Most Ruby course participants have a plethora of questions related to the language; opportunities in Ruby; Ruby’s future etc. Satish Talim of RubyLearning talked to FiveRuns, to get their views and opinion. FiveRuns is building an ecosystem of tools around Rails, including its flagship monitoring and management tool, FiveRuns Manage, and a free Rails stack, FiveRuns Install.

Rails Interview: Michael Slater of BuildingWebApps.com

For the past two years, RubyLearning has been promoting the Ruby language world-wide, by conducting its Free Online Ruby Programming Course. 1000s of participants have either completed or are in the process of completing the course. Most Ruby course participants have a plethora of questions related to the language; opportunities in Ruby; Ruby’s future; Rails etc. Satish Talim of RubyLearning talked to BuildingWebApps, to get their views and opinions. BuildingWebApps is a project of Collective Knowledge Works, Inc.

Appreciating Ruby Bloggers

Darren Rowse, as usual, has come up with a lovely idea “Today is Blogger Appreciation Day [UNOFFICIAL]” – that certainly fosters the sense of community, which I love about blogging. In Darren’s words: We’re in it together, blogging is about collaboration and together going further than we can by ourselves – so why not help another blogger today by shooting them a word of encouragement, a pep talk, a congratulations, an idea to help them improve or some other positive constructive message.

Web Transformations 1.0, 2.0, 3.0, But What Is It?

Today’s guest blogger is Sunil Kelkar, a programmer, author, trainer and speaker. A recognized expert in the field of software development with over 15+ years of I.T. experience, Sunil has consulted and trained teams at various companies in India and the US. He has been involved with Rails for the last two years and Java since 1997. He also imparts Free Online Rails Courses for world-wide participants. Sunil is based out of Pune, India.

Rails TakeFive Interview

It was fun being interviewed by FiveRuns Blog. FiveRuns exists for the express purpose of delivering affordable and radically simplified tools for monitoring applications and their supporting infrastructure with a focus on Ruby on Rails. Every Friday, FiveRuns interviews Ruby/Rails enthusiasts and it was an honor to be amongst luminaries such as Chad Fowler, Peter Cooper, Pat Eyler to name a few. Technorati Tags: FiveRuns, Rails Interview, Rails, Ruby

Ruby and Twitter

Twitter is a service for friends, family, and co–workers to communicate and stay connected through the exchange of quick, frequent answers to one simple question: What are you doing? They say that Twitter is on its way to becoming the next killer app. RubyForge has a command line interface and Ruby api wrapper for twitter. I got hooked on to Twitter just today, when I came across this api. The documentation is not all that complete, given the fact that only John Nunemaker is working on this project.

Ruby Turns 15 on 24th Feb.

Kathryn Barrett reports that this month marks Ruby’s 15th birthday. Yukihiro “Matz” Matsumoto–creator of Ruby confirmed that Ruby was conceptualized and named on Feb. 24, 1993. Mark your calendars. While this doesn’t yet qualify Ruby as an old-timer among programming languages, it’s a good indication that it’s here to stay and probably doesn’t deserve to be called a newcomer any more. Technorati Tags: Ruby programming, Ruby Turns 15 on 24th Feb.

University of Pune: Ruby Programming

With the growing popularity of the Ruby Programming language in India, the University of Pune proposes to introduce Ruby Programming as part of the Masters in Computer Management (MCM) post-graduate course, from June 2008. The University has uploaded the new syllabus on the web so that students, members of the public and experts may post their comments. Technorati Tags: MCM, Ruby programming, University of Pune, University of Pune: Ruby Programming

Why We Love Ruby

Recently, odinjobs talked to a panel of Ruby Experts and asked them

Third edition of "Programming Ruby" now in beta

Dave Thomas just announced that the Third Edition of the PickAxe has just entered beta. Each edition of the book tracks the latest Ruby release, and each is the definitive reference to Ruby. This third edition maintains that tradition, and has been updated to reflect the new features of Ruby 1.9.

Ruby Quote

Recently, Pragmatic Programmer Dave Thomas, author of the ‘Pickaxe book’ Programming Ruby, and co-author of Agile Web Development with Rails and The Pragmatic Programmer, talked with InfoQ about Ruby, Rails and the importance of choosing the right tool for the job.

Josh Software: Making its mark in Ruby on Rails

Pune is now increasingly becoming the hot-bed of Ruby on Rails activity in India and Josh Software Pvt. Ltd. are strongly making a mark in this field. Satish Talim of RubyLearning.com recently talked to Gautam Rege, one of the founders of this company.

"AkitaOnRails" On Anatomy of Ruby Blocks/Closures

Fabio Akita’s “AkitaOnRails” series at RubyLearning.com, for would-be Ruby developers, has been quite a hit. Today in another article, Fabio talks in depth about Ruby’s Blocks/Closures, This is a rather long article but well worth the time invested in reading it.

Ruby Usage Trend in Indian Cities

The RubyLearning.com site has been active for some time now and the users of my site are normally people learning the Ruby programming language.

"AkitaOnRails" On Ruby Symbols

RubyLearning recently caught with Fabio Akita from Brazil and got his viewpoint on one of the vexing areas for beginners in Ruby – Symbols.

Advice For Ruby Beginners 3

Interview: Karmen Blake

Karmen
Blake

(This interview appeared before on 23rd Sept. 2006 on the PuneRuby blog).

Today we talk to Karmen Blake

Advice For Ruby Beginners 2

Advice For Ruby Beginners 1

The popularity of Ruby grows exponentially and with that, more and more people are learning the language. Recently, 400+ would-be Ruby developers from around the world registered for the Free Ruby Lessons at RubyLearning.com and more keep joining everyday. Most Ruby beginners have a plethora of questions related to the language; opportunities in Ruby; Ruby’s future.

Rails Hosting In India

I have been asked time and again about ‘Rails Hosting In India‘ and thought it best that I list down the Rails Hosts that I have heard of, in India.

PLUG MASHUP

The Pune GNU/Linux Users Group have announced ‘PLUG MASHUP‘, a technology event which includes a Hack-a-thon and a mashup camp to be held on October 13th and 14th, 2007 at Bhaskaracharya Pratishthan, Pune, India. The Hack-a-thon will bring together many developers and contributors. It will aim to generate some serious code during the event, in order to help grow the pool of FOSS contributors in India.

Survserv: Rails based Real Time Outbreak Detection System

Arindam
Basu

RubyLearning caught up with Arindam Basu and requested him to brief us about Survserv, a Rails based real time outbreak detection system (still in Beta).

The Ruby Logo Contest

The Ruby Association has announced ‘The Ruby Logo Contest‘. An official Ruby logo is needed to promote Ruby, and therefore a contest to select one.

Interview with Ola Bini &#8211; JRuby Core Developer

Ola
Bini

RubyLearning caught up with Ola Bini at Bangalore, India and talked to him about JRuby. Ola provides some insights for easy adoption of JRuby by the large pool of Java and Ruby developers in India.

Book: Deploying Rails Applications

Deploying Rails Applications – A Step-by-Step Guide by Ezra Zygmuntowicz (Engine Yard founder), Bruce Tate and Geoffrey Grosenbach is now a Beta book. If you buy the book Deploying Rails Applications you can get early notification when it ships, order a beta copy, and support the publisher and author that make it happen. Bruce Tate will be giving a percentage of his cut to charity… probably Homes Without Borders. Please help them make the best book possible.

Web 2.0 Developer -- Consultant @ Accenture

The RubyLearning Job Board has a new job requirement from Accenture, Chicago, IL; San Jose, CA. Company: Accenture Location: Chicago, IL; San Jose, CA Description: Accenture Technology Labs creates a vision of how technology will shape the future and invents the next wave of cutting-edge business solutions. Our research and development team explores new and emerging technologies that are one to five years out, and uses them to create prototypes and cutting-edge solutions that will help organizations maximize performance in the future.

How Can I Make RubyLearning.com More Useful To You?

It’s time for a reader question – how can I make my rubylearning.com site / blog / forum more useful for you? I like to ask readers this question in an effort to keep improving the site / blog / forum and making it more effective in helping to improve your Ruby learning process. I don’t like to lead such discussions too deliberately – but find that the discussion is better if I give a few general questions to stimulate the conversation.

David Black Interview: Talking to RubyLearning.com

Today, I had the good fortune to talk to David Black the author of the very popular book “Ruby for Rails“, on behalf of all the RubyLearning.com members. I have been recommending his book to one and all and if you have not read it yet, do buy yourself a copy. Hello David, and welcome to RubyLearning.com. Why don’t we start with a little bit of your background? I’m a self-taught computer programmer, currently specializing in Ruby and Rails.

RubyLearning.com Forum

You demanded it. You have it! The RubyLearning.com Forum is up and running. (No longer in this form) You have sub-forums related to many topics such Ruby Certification, Book Reviews, Events, Jobs amongst others. Register and frequent the forums. Technorati Tags: RubyLearning.com, RubyLearning.com Forum

Ruby ActiveRecord and MySQL

A lot of you, the readers of my Free Ruby Study Notes, wrote in asking for a simple program and a brief explanation on how to connect to a MySQL database using Ruby and ActiveRecord. I just sat down and added the page Ruby ActiveRecord and MySQL to my RubyLearning site. Have a look. Technorati Tags: ActiveRecord, MySQL, Ruby, Ruby ActiveRecord and MySQL

University of Virginia using RubyLearning.com

Pete Yadlowsky at the University of Virginia is teaching a short course in Ruby to some of his co-workers. The class meets 2 hours once/week for six weeks. It presently meets on Tuesdays, and so he calls it “Ruby Tuesdays” (a humorous allusion to the famous Rolling Stones song and to a restaurant chain). He was looking for good teaching materials and found rubylearning.com, among others. Thanks Pete and all the best for the “Ruby Tuesdays.” Update:\ The University of Washington extension center is offering a Ruby Programming Certificate Program.

JRuby Inside

Peter Cooper has done it again! Peter has just launched JRuby Inside a new “sister” site to his very popular Ruby Inside. JRuby Inside focuses just on JRuby.

Tutorial: Introduction to AWS for Ruby Developers

Today’s web-based applications are required to provide more storage, more compute power, and a greater level of reliability than ever before.

Brainwave DevNet Conference, Hyderabad

The Brainwave DevNet Conference is being held at Hyderabad, India on 27th July 2007. At this conference, Brainwave would be releasing the commercial version of their product ‘The Brainwave Platform’ – an end to end enterprise application development and deployment solution stack, that strives to reduce development time, cost and frees you from hassles of incorporating any new business process. Registration is free and everyone’s invited. Technorati Tags: Brainwave, Brainwave

Trend: India on a RoR wave

With Google Trends, you can compare the world’s interest in your favorite topics. Google Trends shows how frequently your topics have appeared in Google News stories, and in which geographic regions people have searched for them most. Taking this further, I decided to see the trend for Ruby on Rails for the year 2007. Amongst Regions, India is ranked second. When I clicked on India, I found that amongst Subregions Karnataka and Maharashtra are at the top – obviously due to Bangalore, Mumbai, Pune.

Top 346 Ruby on Rails Projects Sites

A quick note. My friend Sunil Kelkar pointed me to this interesting link – Top 346 Ruby on Rails Projects Sites. Technorati Tags: Top 346 Ruby on Rails Projects Sites

Ruby Rails Jobs Update

The Learning Ruby Job Board is getting a very good response from the Ruby and Rails readers of RubyLearning.com. Two new job posts need mention here: DormAid, NY, USA – DormAid is a college service company operating at over 40 major campuses. They are planning to extend their cutting edge web applications to interact with tech-savvy students in more interesting ways. They are looking for college-age web developers/designers who know Ruby on Rails or are willing to learn.

Ruby Study Notes in Italian?

This time around it is not good news or is it? Through some contacts I came to know that an Italian IT journalist has been copying my Ruby Study Notes and publishing it in the journalist’s own name in an Italian online journal – programmazione.it and without providing any copyright information. My initial reaction was one of anger and I shot off an email to the journalist. The email id was fake and naturally the email bounced back.

Ruby Study Notes in French

It’s an honor for me as Richard Piacentini and Mathieu Fosse have agreed to translate my Ruby Study Notes in French. Richard Piacentini is a French Rails enthusiast and evangelist. He and his friend Laurent Julliard did the French Adaption of the book “Agile Web Development with Rails.” He is the creator of RailsFrance.org. He is currently busy organizing the Paris on Rails 2007 conference. Mathieu Fosse is also a French Rails enthusiast.

The 56 Best Ruby on Rails Driven Sites

To showcase the latest and greatest RoR implementations

7 Things You Can Do With Ruby

So you want to do something with Ruby but think there’s not much you can do? Rubbish!

Introduction to Ruby: Videos

Chinmoy Gavini has a nice set of 6 videos that introduces you to Ruby programming. Do check these out and give your feedback. Technorati Tags: Chinmoy Gavini, Ruby Videos

Ruby MySQL Tutorial

This brief Ruby MySQL Tutorial shows you how you can connect to MySQL in Ruby. MySQL support in Ruby was made possible by Tomita Masahiro. He has developed a pure Ruby binding called Ruby/MySQL. We need to install the same on our PC and the installation (you need to be connected to the internet and it takes some time) is as shown below: C:\>gem install mysql Bulk updating Gem source index for: http://gems.rubyforge.org Select which gem to install for your platform (i386-mswin32) 1.

Ruby eBooks

Ruby is growing in popularity. For those looking at learning Ruby, there are many online resources available. In case you want to learn Ruby offline, then here is a list of all the free, Ruby eBooks available for download. Ruby Study Notes. A thorough collection of Ruby Study Notes for those who are new to the language and in search of a solid introduction to Ruby’s concepts and constructs. Purchase this Ruby eBook.

paahijen.com: Applications in Indian Languages

Siddharth Karandikar a PuneRuby member and some of his friends are hard at work in creating paahijen.com – a suit of applications in Indian languages. I asked Siddharth to share some of his experiences with us.

Connect JRuby to MySQL using JDBC

JRuby is a 100% pure-Java implementation of the Ruby programming language that runs in the JVM. MySQL is a one of the most popular open source databases around and is used by many prominent organizations from Yahoo to NASA.

ThinkDRY Interview

Vincent Spehner heads the company ThinkDRY, based in Pune. Recently, I had a chance to talk to him and requested him to share some of his experiences. Here goes.

Rails Developers in India, I'd Recommend

Like Peter Cooper, I too constantly get emails from various readers of RubyLearning.com, who are looking for Rails developers in India for their projects. As I don’t do this myself, I have to keep giving out a list of Rails developers I know and trust or have had good feedback about.

Internationalization in JRuby

I have been using and teaching Java since 1995. The other day, I was talking to my students about Internationalization in Java.

Startups.in Interview

Nag. B is the brain behind Startups.in. Startups.in simplifies the establishment of startups through a collaborative approach that is a win-win situation to all the involved members. I’ve invited Nag to share some of his experiences in this interview.

JRuby: Caffeinated Ruby

Recently, JRuby has been gaining more and more attention in the Java and Ruby communities. Java is a powerful platform and there are millions of lines of Java code being written each month, that the world will have to live with for a long time from now. By leveraging Java the platform with the power of the Ruby programming language, programmers get the best from both worlds. You better not ignore JRuby any more!

Interview: Charles Nutter

(This interview appeared before on 30th Aug. 2006 on the PuneRuby blog). Today’s talk with Ruby Guru, Charles Nutter would be of interest to all of you who have a Java background. Satish Talim>> Hello Charles, and welcome to PuneRuby. Could you tell us something about yourself – your background; where you are based…? Charles Nutter>> I’ve been programming computers since I was in grade school. Since 1996 I’ve been a fulltime Java developer, primarily working on web-based applications using Java EE technologies.

Ruby on Rails in India

I have been asked time and again about companies in India working on Ruby on Rails. Here’s a partial list of companies (in alphabetical order) that do so. 360 Degree Interactive, Chennai Accenture Tech Labs, Bangalore Aditi Technologies, Bangalore Allerin, Mumbai Apptility, Bangalore Better Labs, Pune Blue Whale Labs, New Delhi BroadSpire, Chennai CircleSource, Bangalore CodeWalla, Pune Goldstone Technologies, Hyderabad Itellix, Bangalore MangoSpring Inc., Pune Patni Computers, Hyderabad Persistent Systems, Pune Pinstorm, Mumbai Satyam, Hyderabad SlideShare, New Delhi SlideShare, New Delhi SoftMind Technology, Ahmedabad SurgeWorks, Mumbai Synerzip, Pune Taazza, Bangalore ThinkDRY, Pune Thoughtworks, Pune UrbanEye, Mumbai Uzanto, New Delhi V2 Solutions, Mumbai Viamentis Technologies, Chennai Vinsol, New Delhi WarmlyYours, Hyderabad – Christian Billen is the Chief Information Officer, IT Department.

ColourCode in Ruby

ColourCode is a syntax highlighter. It can read in a source file and generate a syntax-highlighted version in various formats. ColourCode is written in Ruby and licensed under the GNU GPL Version 2. The author, Nikhil Marathe is based in Mumbai and is in the 12th grade. It is really encouraging to find someone so young and in India, putting his Ruby knowledge to good use. All the best Nikhil.

Interview: Shashank Date

Shashank
Date

(This interview appeared before on 28th Aug. 2006 on the PuneRuby blog).

Today we talk to our own Ruby Guru, Shashank Date.

Satish Talim>> Hello Shashank, and welcome to PuneRuby. Could you tell us something about yourself – your background; where you are based…?

Ruby Quirks

Ruby Quirks – peculiarity of behavior? I know this topic is debatable and remember “one man’s meat is another man’s poison!” I plan to write down here (in no particular order), some of the little Ruby quirks that I’ve picked up and which, I now use comfortably. 1. Peter Cooper, the author of the book ‘Beginning Ruby’ introduced me to Real-Time chat using an IRC client. On the #ruby channel at irc://irc.freenode.net/ I heard of this quirk: class MotorCycle def initialize(make, color) @make, @color = make, color end end m = MotorCycle.new('Honda', 'blue') m.instance_variable_set(:@make, 'Kawasaki') m.instance_variable_set(:@gears, 4) puts m.inspect Check the output of the above program.

Interview: Phil Tomson

(This interview appeared before on 18th Aug. 2006 on the PuneRuby blog).

Today, we shall be talking to another Ruby Guru – Phil Tomson.

Interview: Peat Bakke

(This interview appeared before on 17th Aug. 2006 on the PuneRuby blog).

There is a lot to learn from experienced Ruby developers and in our continuing series of talking to such Ruby enthusiasts from around the world, Satish Talim today talks to Peat Bakke.

Ruby: Thrift

Jeremy Durham’s blog talks about an open source software framework for scalable cross-language services development, named Thrift. It combines a powerful software stack with a code generation engine to build services that work efficiently and seamlessly between C++, Java, Python, PHP, and Ruby. Thrift was developed at Facebook. Have a look. Technorati Tags: Thrift

Interview: Elliot Temple

(This interview appeared before on 24th Aug. 2006 on the PuneRuby blog).

Today we talk to Elliot Temple.

Satish Talim>> Hello Elliot, and welcome to PuneRuby. Could you tell us something about yourself – your background; where you are based…?

Interview: Bruce Tate

(This interview appeared before on 15th Aug. 2006 on the PuneRuby blog).

Java is no longer the answer to every software development problem. Ruby is exploding onto the scene, just as Java did at the end of 1990s. Developers are driving the revolution, and the amazing productivity of Ruby on Rails is fueling it. So who better to talk about Ruby and Rails than the strongest proponent of Ruby, Bruce Tate.

Beginning Ruby

The book, Beginning Ruby is a complete beginner’s guide to Ruby and ideal for both people who’ve not programmed before or those who’ve done a little programming but don’t understand the finer details (such as OOP, dynamic languages, or scripting).

on-page.net – A useful Ruby resource

Technorati Tags: on-page.net How many times have you ever needed to find just one argument of a Ruby method/function/operator or just some word of syntax while working? The first thing you have to do is to google it or to use the index of .chm or just Ctrl+F through some manuals or pages… and as a result you have a lot of garbage and you need to search again for some useful sample or description.

Ruby and Rails News

Some interesting news and articles that I thought worth mentioning:

PDF::Writer for Ruby

This brief blog post is in response to the many emails you wrote to me, to blog a bit about PDF::Writer for Ruby.

Ruby Snips

Ruby/GTK2

Ruby/GTK2 is a library that allows Ruby applications to use GTK+ 2.x library. GTK+ is open source and is released under the GNU LGPL licence, so it may be used freely for commercial applications. Ruby/GTK2 is available on Linux, Windows, Mac OS.

Write Ruby code faster with ED for Windows

ED4W is a full featured Programmer’s Editor/IDE with support

Ruby, Rails Survey

Saw this on Ruby-Talk – CodeGear (the Borland spin-off) has a survey open on Ruby and Ruby on Rails.

WarmlyYours Interview

Christian Billen is the Chief Information Officer, IT Department at WarmlyYours. Recently, I had a chance to talk to him and requested him to share some of his experiences. Here goes. Could you tell us something about yourself – your background, where you are based? I was born in Belgium. My father was a programmer and I have self thought myself IT from an early age, even though I was forbidden around the computers of the house (but that’s what makes it fun).

Ruby Video Search

I thought I would let you know that I have added Google AJAX Search on my Learning Ruby site. This embeds a video bar on the web page and lets you watch Ruby and Rails related videos (presentations, tutorials, etc.) you’ve selected, right there on the site itself. Have fun!

Ruby/Tk Tutorial

Ruby/Tk Ruby/Tk provides Ruby with a graphical user interface (GUI). The Tk extension works on Windows, Mac OS X and Unix systems. Previous versions of the Ruby One-Click Installer contained an (old) version of Tcl/Tk. Now this Ruby installer only contains the Ruby bindings to whatever version of Tcl/Tk you wish to install. It’s recommended to use ActiveTcl. Download the file ActiveTcl8.4.13.0.261555-win32-ix86-threaded.exe and install it. Reboot your PC. Simple Tk applications Let’s understand the following program hellotk.rb: require 'tk' hello = TkRoot.new {title "Hello World"} Tk.mainloop The Tk documentation shows the class hierarchy.

Your favourite bit of Ruby code?

An interesting thread at Ruby_talk is ‘Your favorite bit of Ruby code.’ Setting aside time for learning HTML is beneficial to any web host. John Carter from New Zealand has this interesting snippet of code: # Ruby is Objects all the way down and open for extension... class Integer def factorial return 1 if self <= 1 self * (self-1).factorial end end puts 6.factorial Technorati Tags: Ruby code

Convert bytes to megabytes

In one of my projects, I need to find the file-size in megabytes again and again. This simple method helps me to convert the size of a file in bytes to megabytes. This is useful for very large files. MEGABYTE = 1024.0 * 1024.0 def bytesToMeg bytes bytes / MEGABYTE end # big file len = File.size("Dreamweaver8-en.exe") puts len.to_s + ' bytes' # displays 62651176 bytes puts bytesToMeg(len).to_s + ' MB' # displays 59.7488174438477 MB One of the uses for PDF conversion is that by going through the process of converting PDF to Word you’ll have a more easily editable document than if you didn’t do PDF conversion and tried to edit a PDF file.

Update to Rails 1.2.2

Update your working copy to the latest version of Rails 1.2.2, by going to your command prompt and entering:

How has Ruby blown my mind?

Ruby Code blocks – This single language feature in Ruby, has changed the way I think about code. Blocks (called closures in other languages) are definitely, for me, one of the coolest features of Ruby. Will we have closures in Java 1.7 ? I hope we do. Another subtle feature, though not obvious, is that Ruby has revived the programmer in me. By the way, if you don’t know about Apress’ and Pat Eyler’s blog about Ruby contests, check out this month’s contest.

Best Ruby Books

An excellent blog post by Peter Szinek got me thinking on my choice of the Best Ruby Books for the year 2006. Here’s my list: Ruby for Rails by David A. Black The Ruby Way by Hal Fulton Programming Ruby by Chad Fowler, Andy Hunt Ruby Cookbook by Lucas Carlson, Leonard Richardson What is your personal opinion and your choice of books? Technorati Tags: Best Ruby Books

Company Name Approval

So far in our series, we discussed the process of obtaining the DIN and DSC for the proposed Directors. We can now start the process of company name approval by the Registrar of Companies (ROC) in the State/Union Territory in which the company will maintain its Registered Office. This approval is provided subject to certain conditions: There should not be an existing company by the same name. Further, the last words in the name are required to be “Private Ltd.” in the case of a private company.

Locating Office Space

Continuing with our series of blog posts with respect to ‘Setting Up An IT Company In India‘, another parallel activity that you need to start is locating an office space.

AnswerU Interview

Anil Dharni and Brad are the brains behind AnswerU. AnswerU is a solution for fast and accurate answers for university students’ toughest questions. I’ve invited Anil to share some of his experiences in this interview.

Kidzworld: One Of The Largest Ruby On Rails Sites Ever Deployed

Kidzworld: a fully moderated, safe and secure social networking site for kids. In this world, internet savvy grade-schoolers can play games, enter contests, win prizes, test their knowledge in trivia quizzes

Setting Up An IT Company In India

Now-a-days many small (20-40 people) sized companies working with Ruby on Rails in the US and Australia are planning to set-up their own software units in Pune, India.

Ruby and Rails on Update-Scout

Ruby has just been added to Update-Scout.com, an interactive web service, that informs its users about software updates and releases. Users can set up personal update news feeds from the Update-Scout software catalog and even add new entries to the catalog.

Ruby declared TIOBE's Programming Language of the Year 2006!

Curt Hibbs reports that Ruby is now in the top ten languages in the TIOBE index, and has been declared Programming Language of the Year for 2006 because it had the largest popularity increase in 2006 of all the languages tracked.

Ruby Re-Awakens Pune in 2006

In the early part of 2006, in my hometown Pune, everyone would associate Ruby with ‘Ratnaraj‘ or “king of precious stones” as per our ancient language of Sanskrit. Over the year things have changed, and the Ruby language and its famous framework Rails are seeing a huge surge of popularity here.