Blog of Ryan Bigg - Ubuntu, Ruby, RVM, Rails, and You

AppSumo: A Discount Bundle of Webapp Credits Suited to Ruby Developers By Peter Cooper / November 14, 2010 AppSumo is an intriguing "bad ass developer bundle" that brings together $1543 of credit for ten different Web app development related resources (most are Ruby focused or have Ruby APIs) for a mere $47 purchase. The services include: Twilio - an API driven telephony service (I use this — it's great)Heroku - the Ruby webapp hosting environmentHoptoad - the errors notification serviceNew Relic - the performance monitoring and application management serviceAs well as Recurly, SendGrid, MongoHQ, SauceLabs, Infochimps and Linode. Sadly I'm already signed up with most of these services and most of the credits are for new or upgraded accounts only, but if you want to give any of the above services a try or want to build a new app that relies on them, this looks like a steal. I also need to put a big fat disclaimer here in case you have problems with AppSumo: I'm not related to AppSumo, getting nothing from them (shame!)

Twitter Bootstrap, Less, and Sass: Understanding Your Options for Rails 3.1 » RubySource By now, we’ve all seen Twitter Bootstrap – it’s a great CSS and Javascript library open sourced by Twitter that makes it easy to produce a very polished looking site, with fantastic support for layout, navigation, typography, and much more. Twitter Bootstrap is based on Less.js, the popular dynamic CSS scripting language written by Alexis Sellier or @cloudhead. Less.js, like Node.js, is implemented completely with Javascript. While Less is based on Javascript and not Ruby, some great work has been done just in the last couple of months to make it easy to set up Twitter Bootstrap in your Rails 3.1 app using a variety of different approaches. Today I’m going to review the basics of Twitter Bootstrap, and then take a close look at the following gems and libraries: less-rails-bootstrap, sass-twitter-bootstrap, bootstrap-sass and bootstrap-rails. Twitter Bootstrap basics $ git clone $ cp bootstrap/bootstrap.css path/to/app/assets/stylesheets/.

A Look Into Ruby’s Object Model By Peter Cooper / November 3, 2010 A few days ago, Burke Libbey, a Winnipeg based Ruby and Rails developer, gave a presentation called Ruby's Object Model: Metaprogramming and Other Magic to the Winnipeg.rb Ruby user group. I though it was interesting enough to embed here. Presentations about metaprogramming and how the Ruby object model works are hardly anything new, but Burke has approached it in a friendly, easy to understand (though terse - but that's why it's a presentation) fashion, despite including the relevant C from MRI on the slides. Note: If your reader doesn't support embedded presentations, click here to see the presentation on Slideshare.

git Wiki Michael Hartl’s 15 Hours of Rails 3 Screencasts By Peter Cooper / October 13, 2010 Have you seen Michael Hartl's RailsTutorial.org? It's a free online "book" that walks you through from start to finish with building either a Rails 2.3 or Rails 3.0 app (though a $39 PDF rendering is also available). After finishing the book, Michael set to work on some screencasts covering the same ground in video form and it's now released: the The Ruby on Rails Tutorial screencasts, clocking in at over 15 hours of content, are now live. Michael's project is the latest in a line of self publishing efforts in the Ruby and Rails communities and it's gone down a storm on Hacker News. At $85, they might seem steep to some readers, but if you basically want to be able to look "over the shoulder" of an experienced Rails developer and see how a Rails development environment is set up and how multiple apps are built, there's nothing that can beat this. So if you want to learn Rails 3.0 in a practical manner from the ground up, check out Michael's screencasts.

Top 12 Ruby on Rails Tutorials | Learning Ruby On Rails A former student asked me a few days ago how I learned Ruby on Rails. The answer was that I simply read alot of great tutorials. So in the spirit of sharing, here are the 12 tutorials that I found most useful: Rolling with Ruby on Rails – Curtis Hibbs of ONLamp.com offers his first excellent introduction to Ruby on Rails. Hey, Ruby on Rails Fans! UPDATE, JUNE 2009: Want more up-to-date tutorials on Ruby programming? Happy Rails developing and if you have any other tutorials that you’d like to share, please leave them in the comments! Tagged as: ruby on rails, tutorial

20 Ruby on Rails Tuts to Rule Them All Today, we'll review twenty incredible Ruby on Rails tutorials that every developer should consider reading. Whether you're a beginner who prefers video tutorials or an experienced dev, you'll find an applicable tutorial here! 1. Try Ruby! If you're going to have to learn a brand new language, why not learn it interactively? The Try Ruby! 2. This is the definitive tutorial on Rails. 3. If you're a Rails developer, a Mac is an excellent choice for development as Rails comes shipped with Leopard. and you're ready to start building apps. Apple has a lengthy document on the benefits of using a Mac for Rails development, as well as code examples and best use cases. 4. If you've got a whole day set aside to learn Rails, the One-Day Rails course from UC Berkeley is fantastic. 5. Again, not a true Rails tutorial, Why's (Poigant) Guide to Ruby is a fantastic and, ahem... odd way to learn Ruby. I’ll be straight with you. Odd? 6. Authlogic is one of Rails most popular authentication systems. 7. 8.