Tag Archives | ruby

"Learn code the hard way" is Zed Shaw's most awesome project to date

By on April 20, 2012 in books, general, literary, technical

Not a whole lot to say about it, but I think that the Learn Code The Hard Way ini­tia­tive is absolutely awe­some; it's prob­a­bly Zed Shaw's (@zedshaw) best work. I've used his Learn Python The Hard Way book (and snip­pets of Learn C The Hard Way, because some­times the Old Ways are the Best Ways) as ref­er­ence but they really excel when used lin­early to do what it says on the label.

This series uses example-based tuto­ri­als to explain and illus­trate con­cepts and new lessons build upon con­cepts learned from pre­vi­ous lessons and exam­ples. By the time you've gone through one of the books the most fun­da­men­tal lessons have been iter­ated over numer­ous times (but with­out beat­ing you over the head with them), and that's how these things stick. But hon­estly, my favorite things about these books are that they're priced to move (free & cheap, based on what for­mat you're look­ing for) and that they're open-source (the source code is up on Zed's Gito­ri­ous account) but they're edited; no wild-ass Wikipedia style mis­in­for­ma­tion, just peo­ple con­tribut­ing what they know where they think it'll do some good.

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Literary beta testing: Build Awesome Command-Line Applications in Ruby

By on March 21, 2012 in books, ruby

David Copeland (@davetron5000), author of GLI (Git-like Inter­face Com­mand Parser) has writ­ten a book called Build Awe­some Command-Line Appli­ca­tions in Ruby. I've been beta-testing the book while it was going through the pub­lish­ing process, and it is excel­lent. Of note: it focuses on writ­ing com­mand suites (like the rails com­mand or git) and stand-alone command-line appli­ca­tions (like rsync).

Build Awesome Command-Line Applications in Ruby

So like I men­tioned up there, I ini­tially grabbed the book around its sec­ond or third beta release, fig­ur­ing that while it was still in the process of becom­ing a Real Book I some­times feel like I'm still in the process of becom­ing a Real Admin so, you know, what the hell, let's work through it together.

I know a num­ber of devel­op­ers who only know Ruby in the con­text of the Rails frame­work (and maybe related Rake tasks) and this book is an excep­tional guide to using Ruby for more than just Rails appli­ca­tions. Command-line tool­ing has long been an area of inter­est for me as work­ing in oper­a­tions means often hav­ing to per­form a num­ber of repet­i­tive tasks which lend them­selves well to being scripted; good admins write good scripts. More stray obser­va­tions after the jump →.

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Mark Wunsch, on Installing Gems

By on August 8, 2011 in ruby, technical

I have 3 or 4 queued up posts about Ruby but­thurt, and what Mark has to say is pretty in line with a lot of it.

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CSSEdit & TextMate = L-O-V-E

By on November 16, 2007 in applications

I don't know if I've ever per­son­ally men­tioned this and I know I'm years late to the party, but it bears repeat­ing that CSSEdit and Text­Mate are two of the only appli­ca­tions I miss when I'm on a Linux machine. One could argue that there is always (re: eter­nally) going to be vi/vim or emacs, but in my opin­ion there is no beat­ing the com­bi­na­tion of these two appli­ca­tions for web devel­op­ment or lay­out work. Con­tinue Reading →

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