I received a hard copy of the book yesterday from my contact at Manning and I have to say it’s a great looking book, and satisfyingly heavy

Fear not gentle reader, you’ll be happy to hear that the newly updated book from Manning Publications Rails 3 in Action is fully updated to cover Rails 3.1 (and Rails 3 if you’re even farther behind).

I was able to read through some of this book and I have to say that Ryan Bigg and Yehuda Katz did a great job in making an accessible book on rails. Yes, it definitely helps to have at least some rails (and of course ruby) experience, but if you’re reading this blog, you probably have at least a passing understanding of these things. It covers topics such as:

• Testing (early on, which is awesome)
• Nested Resources
• Authentication and authorization
• File uploads
• Email
• API design (for those wanting to go a bit beyond a blog site
• Engines
• Rack based applications

That’s not all of course, that’s just me cherry picking the table of contents. I admit I haven’t read fully all of the topics here, they are quite frankly, beyond me. The book looks great in layout as well, lots of whitespace (even @danbenjamin will approve).

I don’t want to go deep into a review and will just say this. This book hits topics that will matter in real life day to day work. Recipes such as twitter authentication and file uploads are well mixed in with a more traditional style of programming book which walks you through building an application, with successive sections building upon the previous. The writing style is fresh and feels more “conversational” (to me anyway) than other Rails books out there.

The eBook version of the book is released today and you can get a 50% off deal (that’s half price folks) for today only by using the code rails350e if you go and purchase the eBook here.

Disclosure: I was kindly given early access to the eBook by Candace over at Manning.

$ rails test && cd test
[...]
$ script/generate model User name:string age:integer
[...]
$ rake db:create && rake db:migrate
$ vi app/models/user.rb # optional
$ script/console

Voila!  Four commands and you’re in an interactive shell that will let you manipulate your models, add data, run finds, etc.  No need to deal with anything other than an already set up database and model file, and you have a nice interactive shell to boot.

Best part?  Just do an “rm -rf <directory>” when you’re done to nuke the directory and either start again or try out the next experiment.

That about says it all! Kudos to the author for doing this, and please donate and support him!

Design Patterns in Ruby (which I’d seen before but been unable to get).

Refactoring Ruby.

Smalltalk Best Practice Patterns.

I’m looking forward to hearing the talk in which these were recommended, or borrowing them from the FV.rb when/if the club gets them.

Code from Level 6

Thanks to the FV.rb last night I discovered Ruby Warrior, a neat and fun way of learning ruby.  It goes like this….

First, head to http://github.com/ryanb/ruby-warrior/tree/master and download the tree by using “git clone“, then simply run “bin/rubywarrior” out of the main ruby-warrior directory that the git clone command creates.  The first run will create a profile and set up the initial part of the “game”.

The “game” is a bit like the old adventure text games, with a simple ASCII “dungeon” that you see your guy move through, and as the levels progress you will encounter monsters, harder monsters, captives to rescue, and so on as you move from one side of the dungeon to the stairs on the other side.  The system is turn based, so you are basically creating yourself a little state machine.  You basically check to see if there’s something in front of you and if not walk, if it’s an enemy, attack, etc.

To do this you end up doing something like this:

1. You look at the README file in the ruby-warrior/beginner-tower/level-001/ directory.  You may have “intermediate-tower” instead of beginner depending on the level you chose during the initial setup.
2. Follow what the README file says and edit the file ruby-warrior/beginner-tower/level-001/player.rb adding code to make your warrior move and fight.
3. Run bin/rubywarrior and see how well your warrior moves and fights.  It will either succeed and allow you to continue to the next level (in which case go to step 1, substituting the right number in the “level-00N” directory), or you will fail, in which case, re-edit the warrior.rb file and try again.

The game isn’t for complete and total programming n00bs, but might be a bit simple for people who know programming, but not ruby   It starts out with simple commands and simple if/then/else control structures.  However, it does make it cool and interesting enough that it has kept my interest for at least until now.