Aaron Patterson – Google+ – I’m on vacation, so I decided to write a gem that WILL….
Just awesome stuff, my favorite yet. Make sure you follow Aaron on Google+ as well, lots of cool Ruby and Rails related stuff there.
The JetBrains guys have announced that the RubyMine 4.0 Early Access is Open to all. Check out the release notes for more details (including screenshots) or just grab it and go!
Manning books contacted me today to update about the Rails 3 in Action book that I reviewed last month. There are new discount codes available. Use the discount code rails337 for a 37% discount if you purchase it over at the Manning site.
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 
One year after accidentally falling in love with Rails.
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).
So recently Rails 3.1 was released, bringing a ton of fun new features, such as the asset pipeline, streaming, a new migration syntax, and a bunch of other new features. You may ask “hey thinkingonrails guy, how can I learn all this new stuff? There are no books out there that are cutting edge and up to date enough to help me!”
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:
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.
Cool news for the Ruby community…. Matz, creator of the language has joined Heroku (wonder if that’s what they did with their big payday?). Potentially very cool stuff, congrats to Matz and the ruby community (and especially Heroku).
Matz is going to be the Chief Architect. Here’s a press release for you.