My latest order of programming books

A few days ago it was my birthday. This year I decided to reward my aging self with some books I’d had my eyes on. My budget was roughly $250, nothing to snicker at, but programming and computer science books aren’t exactly famous for being inexpensive. The hardest part was shortlisting only a few titles, out of a substantial number of books that interest me. This ruthless streamlining was not solely...

Ruby 1.9 screencasts plus an announcement

Previously I mentioned the importance of migrating away from Ruby 1.8, in favor of 1.9. Before my business trip to Italy, I had a chance to watch David A. Black’s new videos for Envycast, in which he presents the essential concepts required to migrate from Ruby 1.8 to 1.9. This pair of videos totals roughly an hour and a quarter, and can be purchased in a package deal for $16. You probably won’t find...

New look and feel. Do you like it?

Those who follow this blog through the feed, may not have noticed it, but over the weekend I had a chance to revamp the look of Zen and the Art of Programming. I used a WordPress theme I’d already employed on Math Blog and customized it, basing my changes on the suggestions of the participants of my earlier survey on the subject. I’m not a web designer by any means, but I’m quite happy with the way...

Scaling Rails Screencasts

Within the Rails community, New Relic is a company that doesn’t need any introductions. They are synonymous with performance and reliability, thanks to their RPM product for monitoring, detecting, and fixing Rails application performance problems in real time. What everybody may not have noticed though, is that New Relic started something called RailsLab, a site in which they publish videos and other useful...

Sony Vaio FW Series: A Developer’s Review

For the past three months or so I haven’t had a computer of my own. This is not as bad as it sounds, because I’ve had work hardware, but such computers are intended to be used for work purposes only. Now that DB2 on Mac has been released, I’m waiting on the new 17″ MacBook Pro, which will be added to the setup as well, but again, that’s a work machine and it won’t arrive for at...

Learn Merb

The most effective martial artists specialize in their discipline, but are not afraid to cross-train in others. Bruce Lee—arguably the most famous and influential martial artist of the past century—trained first in Tai Chi Chuan, then Gung Fu, and boxing, as well as learning western fencing. The insight taken from so many disciplines led him to create the Jeet Kune Do form of combat. Programmers are not...

IBM’s XML Challenge (lots of prizes inside)

IBM is holding a series of challenges centered around XML. The whole event is labeled The XML Challenge (subtitle: Search for the XML superstar). Rockstar references aside, this is a pretty cool initiative that can provide you with some freebies as well as high quality prizes if you win any of the available contests. The Contests What I say below applies to US and Canada, as the contest is being held worldwide in...

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...