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Advanced Rails offers you an in-depth look at techniques for dealing with databases, security, performance, web services and much more.

O’Reilly Media, Inc. published an intermediate-to-expert Rails book, authored by Brad Ediger:

Chapters in this book help you understand not only the tricks and techniques used within the Rails framework itself, but also how to make use of ideas borrowed from other programming paradigms. Advanced Rails pays particular attention to building applications that scale — whether “scale” means handling more users, or working with a bigger and more complex database.

Design Patterns in Ruby documents smart ways to resolve many problems that Ruby developers commonly encounter. Addison-Wesley Professional press has this exciting book, authored by Russ Olsen.

Russ Olsen has done a great job of selecting classic patterns and augmenting these with newer patterns that have special relevance for Ruby. Most design pattern books are based on C++ and Java. But Ruby is different—and the language’s unique qualities make design patterns easier to implement and use.

Practical Reporting with Ruby and Rails is a great book for Ruby and Rails developers seeking to create compelling business intelligence and reporting solutions using a wide variety of applications and services. Published by Apress, and the author is David Berube.

Business intelligence and real-time reporting mechanisms play a major role in any of today’s forward-looking business plans. With many of these solutions being moved to the Web, the popular Rails framework and its underlying Ruby language are playing a major role alongside web services in building the reporting solutions of tomorrow.

The latest entry in Addison-Wesley’s Professional Ruby Series is The Rails Way, by Obie Fernandez, is a long awaited book billing itself as the “expert guide to building Ruby on Rails applications.”

More precisely, the book dives into nearly every area of the Rails libraries and APIs and acts as a reference work for them. Coming in at about 850 pages, the book is physically very similar to The Ruby Way by Hal Fulton. There’s no denying that these two books look good next to each other on the bookshelf, and a lot of comparison can be made between the two.

For those of you who love to regularly hack with Ruby, Pragmatic Bookshelf press has a scripting language book titled Everyday Scripting with Ruby, authored by Brian Marick.

It’s divided into four parts. In the first, you’ll learn the basics of the Ruby scripting language. In the second, you’ll see how to create scripts in a steady, controlled way using test-driven design. The third part is about finding, understanding, and using the work of others–and about preparing your scripts for others to use. The fourth part, more advanced, is about saving even more time by using application frameworks.

Sinatra is a new cool open-source DSL-driven web application framework!

This super-sexy DSL runs at lighting speed. It sits on top of Mongrel and was written to be thread-safe, sleek and tiny. And an entire web-application can be written and contained in one file (or a small collection of files)!

It’s super easy to use! Let’s create an app from scratch to demonstrate!

Install!

gem install sinatra -y

Use!

• Create a file called lyrics.rb (or any name you like)
• Add

    require 'rubygems'
  
    require 'sinatra'

New Riders Press has recently launched a new web design book titled Bulletproof Web Design, authored by Dan Cederholm:

No matter how visually appealing or content-packed a Web site may be, if it’s not adaptable to a variety of situations and reaching the widest possible audience, it isn’t really succeeding. In Bulletproof Web Design, author and Web designer extraordinaire, Dan Cederholm outlines standards-based strategies for building designs that provide flexibility, readability, and user control–key components of every sucessful site. Each chapter starts out with an example of an unbulletproof site one that employs a traditional HTML-based approach which Dan then deconstructs, pointing out its limitations. He then gives the site a make-over using XHTML and Cascading Style Sheets (CSS), so you can see how to replace bloated code with lean markup and CSS for fast-loading sites that are accessible to all users. Finally, he covers several popular fluid and elastic-width layout techniques and pieces together all of the page components discussed in prior chapters into a single-page template.

Any Ruby on Rails programmer would have touched Active Record, probably in a very early phase. Active Record deals with everything that’s related to the database of your Ruby on Rails applications, and in many ways a bit more.

Apress recently launched Pro Active Record: Databases with Ruby on Rails, which I can honestly say, is the most exhaustive, if not the only, book about Active Record I’ve ever known to date.

microformats has been only two years old, yet it has brought significant changes in a relatively short time.

What is it, actually? According to microformats.org, “[microformats is] designed for humans first and machines second, [they] are a set of simple, open data formats built upon existing and widely adopted standards.”

Enough with the fluff, let’s see how it actually works, microformats in action:

Flickr picture source

The above picture is me browsing to the LinkedIn profile of one of Indonesia’s renowned Ruby on Rails experts, Arie Kusuma Atmaja. The overlay window that contains these semantic information is not a LinkedIn feature. Rather, it is the easily usable, cross-browser Microformats Bookmarklet by LeftLogic. Go on… try it if you haven’t!

Just out from a pack of several of the world’s greatest Ruby and/on Rails programmers: Professional Ruby Collection: Mongrel, Rails Plugins, Rails Routing, Refactoring to REST, and Rubyisms.

GET STRAIGHT TO THE LEADING EDGE WITH RUBY AND RAILS

Information that’s so hot, new, and valuable, you can’t wait for a book. This package brings together 8 breakthrough primers on today’s most valuable Ruby and Rails technologies — including five new digital Short Cuts worth $69.95! From RailsSpace to ActiveRecord to Mongrel, here’s new content, techniques, and code from the Ruby community’s top innovators: insider’s information that’s never been available before in one place.