Merb, Rails Myths, Language Popularity and other Zenbits

Zenbits are posts which include a variety of interesting subjects that I’d like to talk about briefly, without writing a post for each of them. Merb: A few days ago Merb 1.0 was released. Congratulations to Ezra Zygmuntowicz on this important milestone, the Merb community and Engine Yard (who finances the project). Merb 1.0 wasn’t even out yet when some people had already started commenting on the...

Review of the first two Envycasts

The following quiz contains five fairly simple questions about ActiveRecord and Rails 2.2. Try to see if you can answer all of them. 1) What’s wrong with the following (technically valid) line of code? Guide.find(:all, :include => [:user, {:questions => [:user, {:answers => :user}]}], :conditions => "answers.user_id = 42") 2) Having specified :counter_cache => true...

Ruby on Rails for Microsoft Developers available for pre-order on Amazon.com

Ruby on Rails for Microsoft Developers is now available for pre-order on Amazon.com. Contrary to what the Amazon page states, the publication date is planned for the middle of December, not January. Similarly, the description is quite messed up and loosely based on the first outline. It almost makes it sound like a book on Ruby as opposed to one on Rails. In reality, only two chapters are dedicated to Ruby, while...

Ruby and Rails books, two years later (photo)

Two years...

Review of the screencast series The Ruby Object Model and Metaprogramming (episodes 1-3)

Even if you’re new to the Ruby community, you are unlikely not to have heard about the Pragmatic Programmers, who are well reputed for publishing great programming books. You may not have noticed that lately though, they’ve also been releasing several series of screencasts. Each episode lasts about half an hour and sells for a mere $5. This strategy will work well in their favor because screencasts are a...

This Week in Ruby (May 29, 2008)

This is the 9th episode of This Week in Ruby, please consider subscribing to my feed so as to not miss any weekly installments. Ruby Two days ago JRuby 1.1.2 was released. Amongst several bug fixes and improvements, this release is characterized by a focus on performances. Startup time, threading, method calling and YAML symbol parsing have all been drastically improved. Huw Collingbourne of SapphireSteel, has...

Ruby on Rails for Microsoft Developers

Last Friday I sent the first chapter of my book to the Development Editor. It’s only one chapter, which is about 30 pages or so of text and figures. I foresee and fully expect that the real challenges are still to come; yet a great deal of work already went into this first stepping stone and I feel very satisfied by the initial results. While I briefly mentioned, on Twitter and here, that I was going to write...

This Week in Ruby (May 20, 2008)

This is the 8th episode of This Week in Ruby, please consider subscribing to my feed so as to not miss any weekly installments. Ruby Yehuda Katz released a couple of “gems” this week: Thor improves Ruby’s support for scripting, and it was created while he was working on a Textmate gem for handling bundles. You may have heard about the book: The Ruby Programming Language. I found this review to be...

This Week in Ruby (May 12, 2008)

This is the 7th episode of This Week in Ruby, please consider subscribing to my feed so as to not miss any weekly installments. Ruby The tickets for RubyKaigi went on sale yesterday. RubyKaigi is the Japanese equivalent of RubyConf and will take place from the 20th to the 22nd of June. Yehuda Katz blogged about Benchwarmer, which is an improved DSL for doing benchmarks. The repository can be found on GitHub. That...

This Week in Ruby (May 5, 2008)

This is the 6th episode of This Week in Ruby, please consider subscribing to my feed so as to not miss any weekly installments. Ruby Jamis Buck released Net::SSH 2.0, Net::SFTP 2.0, Net::SCP 1.0, Net::SSH::Gateway 1.0 and Net::SSH::Multi 1.0. If you would like to learn why this matters, please head over and read his announcement. Gemstone is working on a Ruby VM, that’s similar to Rubinius, called MagLev....

Agile Web Development with Rails, Third Edition

The Pragmatic Programmers have announced the beta release of Agile Web Development with Rails, Third Edition. The final version of the book, updated to Rails 2, is scheduled to be released for October 2008. Even if the style of the tutorial is not everyone’s cup of tea, this is good news and they surely picked a great author in my fellow IBM colleague Sam Ruby. Quoting myself from three weeks ago: I think that...

On The Last Lecture

Starting today, Amazon will be shipping the hardcover version of “The Last Lecture”, by Prof. Randy Pausch and Jeffrey Zaslow. While I wait for my copy to arrive, I feel the need to express a few thoughts on the subject of this book. Over the past several months I’ve been following closely Randy’s story and was often tempted to write a few lines about his touching message and courageous...

This Week in Ruby (April 7, 2008)

The first edition of This Week in Ruby received a warm welcome from the community. A week later, here we are with a second installment of the series. I’ll attempt to repeat these posts approximately every week, so feel free to follow along by subscribing to my feed. The Ruby community is a tremendously active one. In only seven days, there have been so many noteworthy items popping up, that it would take me hours...

7 soon to be released Ruby and Rails books

With the amount of good Ruby and Rails books already on the market, you’d think 2008 would be a shy year when it comes to publishing new titles, but nothing could be further from the truth. The following books are all to be released this month or in May, and there are many more coming out this summer. Do we really need another 7 titles on the market within 2 months time? Interestingly, the answer is yes, for...

Django’s tipping point

Django seems to have reached its tipping point, that critical mass which will enable its momentum to skyrocket. Getting here took a while though; partially because of a lack of hype and partially due to Rails’ very prominent presence in the market. Now this well deserving framework has finally begun to be widely adopted and considered as a valid alternative to Rails, for agile web development. Why do I care...

Rails is the best thing that ever happened to Python

Rails has been a blessing and a curse for the Ruby community. It brought sudden popularity to the language with all the consequences, good and bad, that usually result from exponential growth. On one hand, it gave many developers the chance to appreciate the design of the Ruby language based on its own merit. On the other hand though, it’s been a cash cow that’s changed the community forever by...

Great Ruby and Rails books

I finally got around to updating my recommended Ruby book page. I decided to split it and create two new pages, one for Ruby and the other for Rails. These include new gems (pardon the pun) such as Obie‘s The Rails Way (best book on Rails currently in print) and the fantastic Design Patterns in Ruby. By the way, the picture on the side is a quick snapshot I took to show some of the Ruby/Rails books I own. In...

How to install Django with MySQL on Mac OS X

Installing Django on Mac OS X Leopard is supposed to be very straightforward, but if you are new to it, you may encounter a few puzzling questions and, in the case of MySQL, even a couple of headaches. I’m writing about this for the benefit of those of you who may attempt and struggle with this feat. MacPorts is not required for this how-to. First and foremost, we are going to install Django from its svn...

A preliminary review of three Cocoa and Objective-C related books

As announced before, I got interested in Mac development, bought a bunch of books and spent a few nights reading and coding. Here are my first impressions on those books which thus far I’ve picked up. I only had time to read 3 chapters from Stephen Kochan’s book and I must say that I’m not impressed! The pace is extremely slow and experienced programmers who read it will be bored to tears. An...

Cocoa is my Cup of Tea

Writing the article “Desktop Applications are not dead!” was an interesting experience that led to vivid discussions about the business of software for desktop applications, including the current limits and options available in this field. In the last comment by Eugueny Kontsevoy (the person I was responding to with my article in the first place), he expressed once again his frustration regarding Windows...