But while all that nuance might have a place in a two-hour dinner conversation with enlightened participants, not so much in a blog post. So let me firebomb the debate with the following list of nuance-less opinions about testing your typical Rails application[...]

I had a great conversation with Dan here at my local Ruby on Rails group about this and while we didn’t see eye to eye, I think we came to the agreement that people are kinda crazy.  On one hand, if you cargo cult all about testing you’ll end up with 30,000 lines of tests for 10 lines of code, or worse, fall into the trap of “ok, time to write my blog in 15 minutes… oh, I should test, what test framework, hmm… maybe I need to write my own, ok, lets start that, oh, how about a new DSL to support it, that’ll make it easier….”  Case in point The Perfect Apostrophe cira 2006 from Merlin Mann.  Or you go to rails looking to write a quick blog project and find that you have to learn RSPEC, Cucumber, Capistrano, WebRat, and 5 other new tools before you can even start writing your blog.

Of course as Dan said, if you come to just write code you’ll just write code, but honestly I think there are  a lot of programmers in an influenceable stage and they come to Rails wanting to do the right thing and see the obsession with testing and maybe get sucked into, as DHH puts it, “fondling balls and confiscating nail clippers” instead of actually writing the code and creating the cool things they’re here to enjoy.

Obviously DHH has a lot of influence in the community, and there is danger of newbies seeing his post and saying “oh, well DHH said not to test so I’m not going to” (note: he never says don’t test).  I think there might be more danger in scaring new members of the community away telling them (in a strong German accent of course) No you may not write ze code, YOU MUST TEST AND YOU MUST TEST ALLLLL ZEE TIME!

As always, this write endorses a middle ground, somewhere in between the extremes.

Potentially completely relevant is Google’s stance on test coverage.

So we didn’t quite make the December release date as we intended, but hey, why break a good tradition and start hitting release targets now! In any case, your patience has been worldly rewarded young grasshopper: Rails 3.2 is done, baked, tested, and ready to roll!

Biggest thing in here for Ruby Newbies I think is the explain queries, which will show exactly what’s going on and help with debugging and performance tuning.  Other things of note is a faster dev mode, an active record key/value store (look out noSQL databases!) and much more.

Via Riding Rails: Rails 3.2.0: Faster dev mode & routing, explain queries, tagged logger, store.

Just awesome stuff, my favorite yet. Make sure you follow Aaron on Google+ as well, lots of cool Ruby and Rails related stuff there.

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

Really interesting article from the Two Pythonistas accidentally fall in love with rails post that was going around the net and the Rails circles a year ago.  Now a year in they are back with another interesting post, moving from Rails to Node/CoffeeScript for their new beta release (of what I can’t tell you, I have no idea what ThinkFuse does).

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.

Matz is going to be the Chief Architect. Here’s a press release for you.