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.

Big news! We’ve opened registration. Early bird tickets are available
for $300 until Midnight, May 31, PDT. Regular registration will be $400,
and available until July 25th at Midnight PDT. After that you’ll be out
of luck. To register:

http://cascadiarubyconf.com/register

As a small aside, we know that some of you may think it’s strange to
open registration before the program is announced. Rest assured that
you’ll have at least six weeks to register after we’ve finalized the
program.

And finally, a related reminder: our CFP is open and we’re looking for
great talks. If you’re interested, head over to:

http://cascadiarubyconf.com/proposals

The CFP will remain open until May 15th and Midnight PDT. As always,
keep your eyes on our site and @cascadiaruby for updates.

If you don’t know what Cascadia is, you can check out the Cascadia Ruby Conf website and if you’re in the Vancouver/Seattle area, definitely sign up and join us!

The renewal for the domain is coming up now and I have still not yet done anything with it, so maybe someone out there in the community can do better than me.

If you’re interested in doing the site, or getting the domain, please contact me at either @arcterex or by email at alan @ ufies.org. Hopefully the domain will do someone in the Ruby and Rails community some good!