Your customers want rock-solid, bug-free software that does exactly what they expect it to do. Yet they can't always articulate their ideas clearly enough for you to turn them into code. The Cucumber Book dives straight into the core of the problem: communication between people. Cucumber saves the day; it's a testing, communication, and requirements tool - all rolled into one.

oreilly.com | 1/31/12 11:10 PM

It's the latest Web-based syndication of Ruby Weekly, the weekly Ruby and Rails e-mail newsletter (which just tipped 11K subscribers). Ruby Weekly now has a 'tips' page where you can submit links for potential inclusion so if you're releasing something or have written a cool post, fill out the form and you may be in Ruby Weekly next week :-)

Headlines

Rails 3.2 Released DHH has unveiled Rails 3.2! Not quite as big a deal as 3.1 but has a faster development mode, faster route recognition, a tagged logger, and more. With Rails master now aiming at 4.0.0, it seems 3.2 may be the last version of Rails to support Ruby 1.8. Read More

www.rubyinside.com | 1/28/12 3:35 AM

Welcome to this week's Web-based syndication of Ruby Weekly, my Ruby e-mail newsletter.

Headlines

Vote for your 'Ruby Hero' in the Ruby Hero Awards The Ruby Heroes awards run each year and present 6 community nominated 'heroes' with an award at RailsConf. Nominations are now open so go and drop your nomination for the Rubyist whose code has brightened up your life the most in the past year.

Heroku Receives InfoWorld's Technology of the Year Award Sorry it's just a press release but it's great to see a company that came up from the Ruby world continue to do well. Read More

www.rubyinside.com | 1/20/12 6:32 PM

Welcome to this week's Web-based syndication of Ruby Weekly, the Ruby e-mail newsletter. While I have you, be sure to follow @RubyInside on Twitter as I'm going to be posting news more frequently there than on the Web site in future.

Follow @RubyInside !function(d,s,id){var js,fjs=d.getElementsByTagName(s)[0];if(!d.getElementById(id)){js=d.createElement(s);js.id=id;js.src="//platform.twitter.com/widgets.js";fjs.parentNode.insertBefore(js,fjs);}}(document,"script","twitter-wjs");

Also, if you're interested in getting one interesting programming related quote or link each day on Twitter, check out @codewisdom.

Follow @CodeWisdom !function(d,s,id){var js,fjs=d.getElementsByTagName(s)[0];if(!d.getElementById(id)){js=d.createElement(s);js.id=id;js.src="//platform.twitter.com/widgets.js";fjs.parentNode.insertBefore(js,fjs);}}(document,"script","twitter-wjs");

Headlines

RSpec 2.8: The Popular Ruby BDD Tool Goes Supersonic RSpec 2.8 and rspec-rails 2.8.1 have been released and some users have been reporting significant performance improvements. Other tweaks include improved documentation, better tag and filtering options, random example execution, and 'rspec --init' for adding RSpec to an empty Ruby project. Read More

www.rubyinside.com | 1/16/12 1:36 PM

RSpec 2.8 has been released, along with rspec-rails 2.8.1 for the full Rails 3.x integration experience.

RSpec is a BDD-focused testing tool that's particularly popular in the Rails world where everyone except DHH is using it (if you believe the hoopla). RSpec has faced accusations of being less than speedy in the past, but it seems 2.8 has had a performance firework shoved up its tailpipe:

David Chelimsky, the creator of RSpec, also notes that in RSpec 2.8:

• the documentation has been significantly improved
• there's improved support for tags and filtering
• random example running order support (with user definable seed)
• rspec --init will create a spec directory and some starter code on a blank project - ideal for Ruby library development!
Read More

www.rubyinside.com | 1/7/12 3:53 PM

Ruby Weekly has just tipped over 10,000 subscribers but I know not everyone is into getting their news via e-mail, so here's the latest frequent roundup of the latest Ruby and Rails news for you, all on the Web :-)

Key News, Releases, and Headlines

Hungry Academy Application Process Closes This Weekend LivingSocial's 'Hungry Academy' will provide a paid, on-site 5 month Ruby and Rails learning experience and mentorship program to a small group of lucky applicants. Interested? You've only got a few days left to apply. Read More

www.rubyinside.com | 1/6/12 5:03 PM

Recently Forbes wrote about the rise of 'developernomics', noting that companies are seeing programmers as a 'safe haven' investment in otherwise troubled times. Maybe.. maybe not.. but the Ruby and Rails job market is as hot as ever, so if you're looking for a new position, be sure to negotiate well! ;-)

To promote a job, see our Post A Job page. Your listing not only ends up on the Ruby Inside and RubyFlow sidebars but also in the 10114 subscriber Ruby Weekly for free (as a bonus) and on our 7305 follower @rubyinside Twitter account. Read More

www.rubyinside.com | 1/3/12 12:06 AM

Ruby isn't known for its game development chops despite having a handful of interesting libraries suited to it. Java, on the other hand, has a thriving and popular game development scene flooded with powerful libraries, tutorials and forums. Can we drag some of Java's thunder kicking and screaming over to the world of Ruby? Yep! - thanks to JRuby. Let's run through the steps to build a simple 'bat and ball' game now.

The Technologies We'll Be Using JRuby

If you're part of the "meh, JRuby" brigade, suspend your disbelief for a minute. Read More

www.rubyinside.com | 12/15/11 2:34 AM

Sinatra Up and Running is a new book published by O'Reilly and written by Alan Harris and Konstantin Hasse that covers the popular Sinatra web application DSL in a brisk 103 pages, acting as a tutorial to newcomers and a handy reference for old hands.

TLDR: It's a short, sweet, relatively cheap and very well written book about Sinatra. Recommended. Buy here.

An interesting quirk of Scandinavian society is the concept of Jante Law. It knocks down standing out and being individual, in favor of communal harmony. Read More

www.rubyinside.com | 12/14/11 5:15 PM

Ludum Dare is an online accelerated game development event that focuses on regular 48 hour competitions. Think Rails Rumble but for games! It's been around since 2002 but has had a big publicity boost recently due to the participation of Notch, the creator of the mind-bogglingly popular indie game Minecraft.

The next Ludum Dare contest is taking place this coming weekend between December 16-19, 2011 and I want to encourage Rubyists to take part. The competition tends to be dominated by Java, Flash, Microsoft XNA developers, and HTML5 developers, so it'd be great to see more Ruby entries (of which there have only been a couple so far)....

www.rubyinside.com | 12/13/11 4:55 PM

2011 is drawing to a close and I have been reminded of a post I made about a year ago: Ruby in 2010: A Retrospective of a Great Year for Ruby. 2010 was a stunning year with the release of Ruby 1.9.2, MacRuby 0.5, Sinatra 1.0, Rubinius 1.0, and...

www.rubyinside.com | 12/7/11 5:36 AM

Welcome to this week's Web-based syndication of Ruby Weekly - it's bumper sized this week. And a big congratulations to David Heinemeier Hansson, creator of Rails, as he got married recently!

Headlines

...

www.rubyinside.com | 12/3/11 2:36 AM

It's a couple of days late but here are the main headlines from the last week of Ruby news. We have a couple of Rails releases, some event news, and the usual gaggle of great articles and jobs.

Headlines

Rails 3.1.3 Released (Very Quickly After 3.1.2) This release mainly contains...

www.rubyinside.com | 11/29/11 2:02 AM

Now you can bring the best of Ruby into the world of Java, with Using JRuby. Come to the source for the JRuby core team's insights and insider tips. You'll learn how to call Java objects seamlessly from Ruby, and deal with Java idioms such as interfaces and overloaded functions. Run Ruby code from Java, and make a Java program scriptable in Ruby. See how to compile Ruby into .class files that are callable from Java, Scala, Clojure, or any other JVM language.

oreilly.com | 11/24/11 10:07 PM

Take advantage of Sinatra, the Ruby-based web application library and domain-specific language used by GitHub, LinkedIn, Engine Yard, and other prominent organizations. With this concise book, you will quickly gain working knowledge of Sinatra and its minimalist approach to building both standalone and modular web applications.

oreilly.com | 11/24/11 10:07 PM

With this digital Early Release edition of MacRuby: The Definitive Guide, you get the entire book in its earliest form -- the author's raw and unedited content -- so you can take advantage of this content long before the book's official release. You'll also receive updates when significant changes are made, as well as the final ebook version. Learn how to develop applications for Mac OS X with MacRuby, a developer-friendly language that provides access to all of the features available to Objective-C programmers, including Interface Builder, the Cocoa libraries, Objective-C runtime, and more.

oreilly.com | 11/24/11 10:07 PM

After last week's bumper set of releases the Ruby world seems a lot quieter this week :-) (Even here. I've been hidden away teaching my Ruby Reloaded course!)

Headlines

www.rubyinside.com | 11/13/11 6:11 AM

In math, a unary operation is an operation with a single input. In Ruby, a unary operator is an operator which only takes a single 'argument' in the form of a receiver. For example, the - on -5 or ! on !true.

In contrast, a binary operator, such as in 2 + 3, deals with two arguments. Here, 2 and 3 (which become one receiver and one argument in a method call to +).

www.rubyinside.com | 11/8/11 7:27 PM

The Ruby standard library (a.k.a. stdlib) is a collection of Ruby libraries that, at one time or another, have been considered useful enough to include with the MRI Ruby implementation by standard. Due to the popularity of these libraries, other Ruby implementations have then tended to re-implement or include the standard library too.

As part of the march toward Ruby 2.0, the state of Ruby's 'standard library' has come up for discussion. A popular line of thinking (and IMHO, very likely to actually happen) is that the standard library should be 'gemified' for Ruby 2.0.

www.rubyinside.com | 11/7/11 3:28 PM

The rapid descent of the weather towards winter is getting people to stay in and code and long may it continue given the quality of this week's releases: OmniAuth 1.0, MagLev 1.0, and Ruby 1.9.3, for starters!

Headlines

www.rubyinside.com | 11/6/11 12:54 AM

Recently, there have been many screencasts of people coding things in real time. Yesterday, Ryan Bigg released a video of him implementing Conway's Game of Life from scratch by reading through the 'rules' and then using RSpec to take a test driven approach to fleshing out the functionality.

Ryan is a Ruby Hero and technical writer best known for being co-author of the recently released Rails 3 in Action (along with Yehuda Katz) which I'll be reviewing soon for Ruby Inside. But Ryan's also been getting into doing a little screencasting.

www.rubyinside.com | 11/2/11 2:25 AM

Ruby and Cocoa on OS X, the iPhone, and the Device That Shall Not Be Named oreilly.com | 10/28/11 11:16 PM

This week brings us a new JRuby release, some Ruby 2.0 news (but you knew that already, right? ;-)) and a new BDD library that seems to have struck a chord with the people I'm following on Twitter. Also, my Ruby Reloaded course is now also over half booked out so if you're curious, definitely check it out now.

Without further ado, here's a round up of the top Ruby news and releases from the last week, courtesy of Ruby Weekly.

www.rubyinside.com | 10/27/11 7:28 PM

You should learn a programming language every year, as recommended by The Pragmatic Programmer. But if one per year is good, how about Seven Languages in Seven Weeks? In this book you'll get a hands-on tour of Clojure, Haskell, Io, Prolog, Scala, Erlang, and Ruby. Whether or not your favorite language is on that list, you'll broaden your perspective of programming by examining these languages side-by-side. You'll learn something new from each, and best of all, you'll learn how to learn a language quickly.

oreilly.com | 10/25/11 2:09 AM

Today, Yusuke Endoh posted to the ruby-core mailing list noting that matz has admitted him as a Ruby 2.0 "release manager" and as part of his work, he has come up with a tentative schedule for Ruby 2.0's release. You can read the full post here.

The short version of the timeline?

www.rubyinside.com | 10/24/11 9:01 PM

Yesterday, Matz made a commit to the MRI Ruby repository bumping the trunk version from 1.9.4 to 2.0.0, marking the start of the work of implementing the long-discussed ideas for Ruby 2.0.

What is Ruby 2.0?

Ruby 2.0 is the next major version release of MRI Ruby, the de facto official Ruby implementation.

www.rubyinside.com | 10/20/11 6:00 PM

In Rubyists Already Use Monadic Patterns, Dave Fayram made a passing reference to using ||= to set a variable's value if its value were 'Nothing' (false or nil in Ruby). The resulting Reddit quickly picked up on his definition (which was fixed later) and argued about ||='s true meaning which isn't as obvious as many Rubyists think. This spread to Freenode's awesome #ruby-lang IRC channel where I picked it up.

Abstract (or the TLDR Version)

A common misconception is that a ||= b is equivalent to a = a || b, but it behaves like a || a = b

www.rubyinside.com | 10/18/11 4:37 AM

Back in 2008 and 2009, Ruby Inside had a long line of "Interesting Ruby Tidbits That Don’t Need Separate Posts" posts, aimed at sharing a collection of news and libraries in one hit. In the last year, I've shifted Ruby Inside to focusing on less frequent tutorials or investigative features and have been putting all of the news on Ruby Weekly, my weekly newsletter.

There are still many, though, who would prefer to read the news in their RSS readers or on the Web, so I'm going to be taking the things I find for Ruby Weekly each week, doing a little reformatting, and sharing them here on Ruby Inside too. The longer articles will then slot in nicely in between :-)

www.rubyinside.com | 10/18/11 1:10 AM

Ruby Inside wouldn't be what it is without you but it's time for me to thank the companies who also help to keep Ruby Inside going by sponsoring my work. Thanks!

I take care not to accept sponsors who have little of interest to the Ruby scene so hopefully you'll find something useful below - it's not a roster of faceless companies, these folks are doing great stuff.

www.rubyinside.com | 10/11/11 5:56 PM

On August 1, 2011, Ruby 1.9.3 preview 1 was released. The final version isn't yet out (as of September 23) but Ruby 1.9.3 is going to be the next, full production-level release of MRI Ruby. But what's the deal with 1.9.3 (and its successors, Ruby 1.9.4 and 2.0)? Keep reading!

The Summary

Ruby 1.9.3 is a relatively minor improvement on the Ruby 1.9.2 we already know and love. In short.

www.rubyinside.com | 9/23/11 8:28 PM

In a presentation about Ruby 1.9.3, Yuki Sonoda notes that Ruby 1.8 has "no future" and its "end of life" is being discussed pretty seriously. Ruby 1.8 is becoming history, but what's the alternative? Why, Ruby 1.9! :-)

Even amongst the groups I'm involved with, I've seen a lot of resistance to Ruby 1.9. Sometimes it's because of deployment or library concerns, but often there's a hesitancy over what's changed, what's new, or what has been flat out removed from 1.9. So I've been working on something to help out.. because I think Ruby 1.9 is awesome and everyone should be taking it seriously ASAP.

www.rubyinside.com | 9/20/11 6:16 PM

Despite RSpec's awesomeness, Test::Unit remains the most popular Ruby testing tool out there outside of Rails apps. I've recently been code walking through a lot of Ruby libraries for my Ruby Reloaded course and the typical arrangement is Test::Unit, sometimes coupled with Shoulda or Contest for some extra syntactic sweetness.

Part of the reason for Test::Unit's enduring popularity is its presence in the Ruby standard library but, also, its general 'lightness' and speed. When you're writing a large app, using a powerful full-featured system like RSpec has significant benefits (particularly stakeholder involvement in writing the specs). But when you're working on a library that might spread far and wide and is aimed solely at developers, the pros of Test::Unit shine through.

www.rubyinside.com | 9/2/11 9:35 PM

Apache Hadoop is ideal for organizations with a growing need to store and process massive application datasets. With Hadoop: The Definitive Guide, programmers will find details for analyzing large datasets with Hadoop, and administrators will learn how to set up and run Hadoop clusters. The book includes case studies that illustrate how Hadoop is used to solve specific problems.

oreilly.com | 8/30/11 11:40 PM

Apache Hadoop is ideal for organizations with a growing need to store and process massive application datasets. With Hadoop: The Definitive Guide, programmers will find details for analyzing large datasets with Hadoop, and administrators will learn how to set up and run Hadoop clusters. The book includes case studies that illustrate how Hadoop is used to solve specific problems.

oreilly.com | 8/30/11 11:25 PM

It seems the Ruby and Rails job scenes are on fire! I don't remember running so many jobs across a single month before. 22 Ruby and Rails jobs are here and they're spanning the world. US West Coast, East Coast, England, Scotland and Germany are all represented. It's definitely not the common "San Francisco or nothing" roundup :-)

Also fresh this time around is the mention of "all levels" or "junior" roles. At least a few of the jobs listed here today are open to all skill levels or are explicitly junior in nature. I've had a lot of readers get in touch requesting more listings like these so I'm glad they've come along.

www.rubyinside.com | 8/27/11 6:06 PM

rbenv is a new lightweight Ruby version management tool built by Sam Stephenson (of 37signals and Prototype.js fame).

The established leader in the Ruby version management scene is RVM but rbenv is an interesting alternative if you want or need something significantly lighter with fewer features. Think of it as a bit like Sinatra and Rails. It's not about which is the best, it's about which is better for you and your current requirements.

www.rubyinside.com | 8/16/11 5:39 AM

Between August 19—20, 2011, Madison, Wisconsin plays host to thirty-seven speakers and panelists to discuss Ruby, OSS, and community in the form of Madison Ruby Conference. Speakers include Jeff Casimir, Giles Bowkett, Bryan Liles, Sven Fuchs, Steve Klabnik, Brian Hogan, Jacqui Cox, Lori Olson, Gerred Dillon, Barry Hess, and Chad Pytel amongst others.

I sat down with Jim Remsik, the driving force behind the conference, to discuss what awaits attendees.

www.rubyinside.com | 8/10/11 11:34 PM

In the past couple of months I've seen situations arise where developers aren't entirely sure how Ruby has chosen to interpret their code. Luckily, Ruby 1.9 comes with a built-in library called Ripper that can help solve the problem (there's a 1.8 version too, see later). Here, I give the 30 second rundown on what to do.

A Mystery To Solve

I've seen this confusion appear twice in the last month (the second time was what inspired me to write this post).

www.rubyinside.com | 8/6/11 12:35 AM

Official project sites should set the benchmark for standards relating to that project in terms of the best quality and most up to date news updates, documentation, download links, tutorials, and so forth. On this front, Ruby's official site at ruby-lang.org is doing a bad job.

The site's footer says it's "proudly maintained by members of the Ruby community" and links to the homepage of the rather anonymous Ruby Visual Identity Team who redesigned it 5 years ago. Sadly, though, the site doesn't seem to get much proud maintenance and as, perhaps, the most popular destination for newbies checking out Ruby on a whim, it's not playing a strong hand.

www.rubyinside.com | 8/3/11 5:15 AM

A few months ago, Ruby Inside wrote about using Spork with RSpec 2 and Rails 3 in order to get a more sprightly spec run. Unfortunately, using the techniques in the article with our fledgling codebase's test suite left us with somewhat disappointing results, so I decided to dig deeper and see if I could do better.

Note: This is a guest post by Jon Frisby of Cloudability. See the post footer for more info.

www.rubyinside.com | 8/3/11 1:18 AM

Over on the ruby-talk mailing list, Yuki "Yugui" Sonoda announced the release of Ruby 1.9.3 Preview 1:

It's important to note that this is not the latest production release of Ruby 1.9 (that remains Ruby 1.9.2-p290 for now) but is a preview release so you can try out your libraries and other important code ahead of the full production release of Ruby 1.9.3-p0.

www.rubyinside.com | 8/1/11 5:01 PM

Ready to learn Rails? Unlike most Rails books, Learning Rails is for web developers, and not for programmers. You’ll start from the foundations of the Web you already know, and learn how to create something visible with Rails before reaching the more difficult database models and controller code. Learning Rails 3 covers the most recent developments.

oreilly.com | 7/27/11 2:09 AM

Learn how to automate your build, integration, release and deployment process with Jenkins, the popular Java-based open source tool that has revolutionized the way teams think about continuous integration (CI). This concise guide shows you how to seamlessly include Jenkins in the development process—and demonstrates how CI can save you time, money, and many headaches.

oreilly.com | 7/20/11 11:39 PM

I don't like being negative on Ruby Inside without good reason. Trivia like DHH's test library preferences can provide a fun talking point but pointing out specific flaws in someone's work is rarely insightful.

I wasn't going to publish a review of this book, but when I discussed the issues with people on IRC, Twitter and e-mail (trying to find someone who'd say something good about it), I was told several times to publish my thoughts, primarily to serve as a warning to newcomers who may pick it up. I agree.

www.rubyinside.com | 7/19/11 1:52 AM

Over at the always-riveting official Ruby blog, Shota Fukumori has announced the release of Ruby 1.9.2-p290, the latest 'patchlevel' release of the current production release of Ruby MRI.

Patchlevel 290 is the first production-level patchlevel release of MRI since patchlevel 180 back in February so it's worth upgrading if you're on 1.9.2. The release post duly notes.

www.rubyinside.com | 7/16/11 3:47 AM

The Ruby and Rails job scene continues to grow through 2011 and we've got *drumroll* 13 (lucky for some) jobs to share from the Ruby Jobs board from companies like Simon & Schuster, AlphaSights and CustomInk. They're all across the US with a couple in the UK for good measure.

To promote a job, see the Post A Job page. A bonus is your ad gets into the 6463 subscriber Ruby Weekly for free and our 5837-follower-strong @rubyinside Twitter account.

www.rubyinside.com | 7/15/11 11:05 PM