Recommended Ruby and Rails books (August 2009)

I finally got around to updating the Ruby and Rails book pages. The existing list was getting a bit obsolete and I didn’t like the idea of recommending old books to newcomers. I also had some interesting new entries. Without further ado: Recommended Ruby Books Recommended Rails Books A few people may disagree with the choices, but I think most experienced Ruby and Rails programmers, who’ve read those...

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...

The Great Ruby Shootout (December 2008)

The long awaited Ruby virtual machine shootout is here. In this report I’ve compared the performances of several Ruby implementations against a set of synthetic benchmarks. The implementations that I tested were Ruby 1.8 (aka MRI), Ruby 1.9 (aka Yarv), Ruby Enterprise Edition (aka REE), JRuby 1.1.6RC1, Rubinius, MagLev, MacRuby 0.3 and IronRuby. Disclaimer Just as with the previous shootout, before...

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...

What Arc should learn from Ruby

There was a lot of buzz surrounding Arc before it was released. Then Paul Graham made an early version available to the public and most people weren’t too impressed. Paul is a charismatic figure and has his own following, so despite the uncertain welcome that the language received, Arc managed to attract a small community of curious developers. Then silence. For a few months, most people hardly heard anything...

This Week in Ruby (June 26, 2008)

This is the 11th episode of This Week in Ruby, please consider subscribing to my feed so as to not miss any weekly installments. This edition begins with some bad news: Several vulnerabilities that affect the main Ruby implementation have been discovered. There is no reason to freak out, but they are serious. An ill-intended person could take advantage of these vulnerability and execute arbitrary code. Matasano has...

This Week in Ruby (June 16, 2008)

This is the 10th episode of This Week in Ruby, please consider subscribing to my feed so as to not miss any weekly installments. As announced a few days ago, This Week in Ruby is being split into two parts: This Week in Ruby and This Week in Rails. The one you are reading is the Ruby edition, while Riding Rails – the official Rails blog – will host the Rails one. Links to and from each post will be...

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...

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 (April 28, 2008)

This is the 5th episode of This Week in Ruby, please consider subscribing to my feed so as to not miss any weekly installments. Rails For some, the greatest Rails news this week was the announcement of a third edition of the Agile Web Development with Rails book. It’s currently in beta and will be finished by October, much to the anticipation of many, I’m sure. Another interesting development, this time...

This Week in Ruby (April 21, 2008)

This is the 4th episode of This Week in Ruby, please consider subscribing to my feed so as to not miss any weekly installments. Ruby As you’ve probably heard by now, this week Ruby 1.8.7-preview1 was released and it’s a major upgrade because it includes several backports from Ruby 1.9. It should help many in this transitionary period without substantially breaking the existing code. On the subject of...