New Release of the Ruby Driver and Rails Adapter for DB2

The API team at IBM recently released a new update for the ibm_db gem, which includes both the Ruby driver and the Rails adapter for DB2 (and Informix). This coincides with the release of the latest major upgrade to DB2 LUW (Linux/Unix/Windows), which is now up to version 10.1. ibm_db 2.5.10 adds support for Rails 3.2 and fixes a few minor bugs that have been reported by the community. New features such as Time...

RubyMotion brings serious Ruby development to the iOS world

For the past several months I’ve been involved with, but unable to publicly discuss, an exciting project called RubyMotion. My friend Laurent Sansonetti, creator of MacRuby, has now officially launched a serious alternative to Objective-C for iPhone and iPad development. RubyMotion is not a bridge; it actually generates native applications that are as fast as the ones written in Objective-C . You can check...

A Big List of Interesting Programming Books Released in 2011

The following is a list of 48 interesting programming books that were released in 2011. While technically some of them are only programming-related and not about coding per se, each one is sure to be of interest to some programmers. As some of you know, I run a service called Any New Books?, which emails you a list of new books that are related to the categories of your choice each week. For the most part I pulled...

Speeding up queries by a factor of 100 or more with DB2 Text Search

During a recent Rails project at IBM we had to deal with a large table consisting of customers. The table is made up of legacy enterprise data, and contains close to a million records. Among many other fields, the table Customers includes a column name defined as VARCHAR. name is used to store company names. One of the requirements for the project was to implement a Google Suggest-like feature. That is, when...

10 Ruby One Liners to Impress Your Friends

Someone came up with a list of 10 one-liner examples that are meant to showcase Scala’s expressiveness. A CoffeeScript version quickly emerged, so I thought I’d publish a Ruby one. I find Ruby’s syntax to be a bit cleaner than Scala’s, but the substance (at least as far as these examples are concerned) is relatively similar. Multiply each item in a list by 2 (1..10).map { |n| n * 2 } Sum a list of...

Interview with the Compilr.com team

1. For those who don’t know, what is an online compiler and how did you come up with the idea? An online compiler, or online IDE is a full software development environment on the web. This allows us programmers to develop from a wider range of machines without any software installations, and to always have our code handy whenever we may need it. There are a wide range of online compiler’s out there...

Installing Python, Django, and DB2 on Ubuntu 11.04

Note: This is the Python version of the Ruby guide I just published. In this brief tutorial I’ll show you how to create a complete Python and Django setup for DB2 on Ubuntu. By following my step-by-step instructions, you’ll be able to install the following components: Python easy_install Django DB2 Express-C 9.7.4 The official Python driver, dbi module, and Django adapter for DB2 Installing Python and...

Installing Ruby on Rails and DB2 on Ubuntu 11.04

In this tutorial I’ll show you how to create a complete Ruby on Rails setup for DB2 on Ubuntu. Following my step-by-step instructions, you’ll be able to install the following components: Ruby 1.8.7 Rubygems Ruby on Rails DB2 Express-C 9.7.4 The official Ruby driver and Rails adapter for DB2 Installing Ruby We are going to install Ruby 1.8.7 using the Debian packages that are available in the default...

FAQ: What programming language should I learn first?

There are hundreds of different programming languages out there. As a newcomer you can ignore the fact that most of them exist. However, even if we narrow the list to just a dozen mainstream languages, deciding on what programming language to learn first can be a daunting task. You might find yourself asking, should I learn C, C++, Java, C#, or PHP first? If you ask ten programmers this question, you’ll...

Interview with Michael Hartl, author of the Rails 3 Tutorial

The following is an interview with Michael Hartl, author of the popular Rails 3 Tutorial. I want to thank Michael for his time and answers. Be sure to read until the end; as per Monday’s post, I’m doing a Twitter giveaway for this interview, too. 1. How did you go from Theoretical Physics to Ruby Programming? I have a background in computational physics, and I learned Perl and then Python to avoid the...

Eloquent Ruby Review

In 2007 Russ Olsen published Design Patterns in Ruby (US | UK | CA). Right around that time there were several other Ruby books hitting the shelves (as Rails was really reaching the peak of its popularity), however Olsen’s book managed to distinguish itself as a highly valuable resource for readers who wanted to better understand how to apply design patterns to Ruby programming (in an organic rather than dogmatic...

The recommended Ruby and Rails book pages have been updated

During the holiday lull I managed to finally update the Ruby and Rails book pages. The Ruby page includes a few new titles and sees a few existing ones get the axe, as I took the major emphasis on Ruby 1.9 into consideration when updating this list of books. The Rails page is a complete rewrite as I’ve removed any trace of Rails 2 books. I outlined a useful path of Rails books to follow based on the few...

StreamSend is looking for a senior (Rails) web developer

This is just a quick heads up for my US readers. Given the tough economy we’re all battling, I thought you might be interested in learning about a great employment opportunity. My friends at StreamSend are looking for a senior web developer (preferably one with Rails experience, however they don’t discriminate as long as you can learn quickly and have enough web development expertise to satisfy their...

Get weekly emails about new Programming books

Today I’m announcing a pet project of mine that I think may interest some of my readers. Any new books? is a free notification service which enables you to subscribe to a series of subjects that interest you and receive weekly emails about new book releases in those categories. These books are hand-selected, to filter out obvious duds, and include only books that appear to be promising/interesting. Naturally I...

The Great Ruby Shootout (July 2010)

The Great Ruby Shootout measures the performance of several Ruby implementations by testing them against a series of synthetic benchmarks. Recently I ran Mac and Windows shootouts as well, which tested a handful of implementations. However this article reports on the results of extensive benchmark testing of eight different Ruby implementations on Linux. The setup For this shootout I included a subset of the Ruby...

In-Depth Book Review: Practical Clojure

Title: Practical ClojureAuthors: Luke VanderHart and Stuart SierraTrue pp.: 198Publisher: ApressPublished on: June 2010ISBN-13: 978-1430272311Rating: 6.5/10 Published in June 2010, Practical Clojure by Luke VanderHart and Stuart Sierra is the latest Clojure book to hit stores. Despite the Clojure 1.0 jar shown at the beginning of the book, this title tries to cover the current version of the language, including...

How to setup Clojure from scratch

My previous post about Clojure generated quite a bit of interest, so I thought I’d follow it up with something a bit more concrete. I primarily wrote this article for a friend who asked me for guidance on how to set it all up; and while this isn’t he only way to setup Clojure, I hope it will help other people who are also getting started with this great language. As some people pointed out, setting up...

Thoughts on Clojure

Lisp has had a tremendous impact on the world of programming. Even though Common Lisp and Scheme — the two main Lisp dialects — may not be considered mainstream today, several popular languages have been influenced by one or both of them. It isn’t stretching things too much to say that both Ruby and Python can be seen as slower, easier (for beginners), object-oriented, infix Lisp dialects. Some may...

The pursuit of excellence in programming

As I write a series of thoughts on the pursuit of excellence in programming, I must preface my essay by asking you to ignore that I wrote these words. I invite you to evaluate the opinions and ideas presented here not ad hominem, but rather on the basis of their own merits. It would be easy to otherwise mistakenly dismiss them with the infamous question posed by Steve Jobs to a blogger: “What have you done...

The Great Ruby Shootout (Windows Edition)

This post contains the results of a Ruby shootout on Windows that I recently conducted. You can find the Mac edition, published last month, here. I was planning to have this one ready much sooner, but a couple of serious events in personal life prevented that from happening. Be sure to grab my feed or join the newsletter to avoid missing the upcoming Linux shootout. The setup For this shootout I included a subset of...