Looking to learn Ruby programming language? You’re lucky: The Book of Ruby, fresh from the oven 3rd Edition has been published by No Starch Press. Written by Huw Collingbourne, the developer of Ruby in Steel IDE, so it’s quite a special treat.

The book contains 425 pages in 20 chapters, while quite short it explains well a lot of the Ruby programming language constructs that you will use everyday.

Ruby development learning materials covered are as follows:

• Chapters 1 to 3 cover strings, numbers, etc as well as the basic Ruby class hierarchy.
• Chapter 4 tackles arrays and hashes.
• Chapters 5 and 6 cover loops and conditionals.
• Chapters 7 to 10 teach methods, arguments, exceptions and blocks.
• Chapter 11 covers symbols, a small but important piece of the puzzle.
• Chapter 12 describes Ruby modules and mixins.
• Chapter 13 is about files and I/O.
• Chapters 14 to 20 are a mishmash of various smaller topics such as YAML, a short chapter on Rails, etc.

Some chapters are structured like tutorials and are truly a joy to read. Instructions on the book are easy follow even for beginners. The author usually goes straight to the point, explaining the principles, usage description, with several practical examples.

Only a single chapter in this book, chapter 19, is devoted to Ruby on Rails web applications development. Though it is very short, it serves well as quick way to get you started with Web 2.0 applications programming. This also proves Ruby on Rails’ powerfulness: you don’t need to do much to get the common functionality working rightaway! Ruby on Rails lets you focus on the tasks that matter, saving you from the boring boilerplate work.

Even if you already start developing with Ruby on Rails, this book will help you unleash the potential of your Ruby on Rails apps with Ruby language features you may not know before. You can get The Book of Ruby here.

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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.

You’ll find plenty of examples and code samples that explain:

• Aspects of Ruby that are often confusing or misunderstood
• Metaprogramming
• How to develop Rails plug-ins Different database management systems
• Advanced database features, including triggers, rules, and stored procedures
• How to connect to multiple databases
• When to use the Active Support library for generic, reusable functions Security principles for web application design, and security issues endemic to the Web When and when not to optimize performance
• Why version control and issue tracking systems are essential to any large or long-lived Rails project
• Advanced Rails also gives you a look at REST for developing web services, ways to incorporate and extend Rails, how to use internationalization, and many other topics.

Advanced Rails is an essential resource for improving your skills on Rails through advanced techniques.

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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.

In this book, Russ Olsen demonstrates how to combine Ruby’s power and elegance with patterns, and write more sophisticated, effective software with far fewer lines of code.The book especially calls attention to Ruby features that simplify the use of patterns, including dynamic typing, code closures, and “mixins” for easier code reuse.

Design Patterns in Ruby also identifies innovative new patterns that have emerged from the Ruby community. These include ways to create custom objects with metaprogramming, as well as the ambitious Rails-based “Convention over Configuration” pattern, designed to help integrate entire applications and frameworks.

More resources:

• “Design Patterns in Ruby” at Amazon.com
• Review at barnesandnoble homepage

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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.

Practical Reporting with Ruby and Rails is the first book to comprehensively introduce this popular framework, guiding readers through a wide-ranging array of features. Note this isn’t a staid guide to generating traditional reports, but rather it shows you how the Ruby language and Rails framework can create truly compelling reporting services by plugging into popular third-party applications and services such as Google AdWords, UPS.com, iTunes, and SalesForce.com.

There’s a lot to learn from this book, including:

• Create reporting solutions for both the Web and the desktop.
• Integrate with powerful third-party retail solutions such as eBay, and Amazon.com in order to monitor your sales campaigns in real-time.
• Build an invoice reporting system using Rails and PayPal.
• Monitor your sales performance by taking advantage of SugarCRM’s web service offerings.

More resources:

• Editorial review at Amazon.com

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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.

Using detailed code examples, Obie systematically covers Rails’ key capabilities and subsystems. He presents advanced programming techniques, introduces open source libraries that facilitate easy Rails adoption, and offers important insights into testing and production deployment. Dive deep into the Rails codebase together, discovering why Rails behaves as it does– and how to make it behave the way you want it to.

This book will help you:

• Increase your productivity as a web developer
• Realize the overall joy of programming with Ruby on Rails
• Learn what’s new in Rails 2.0
• Drive design and protect long-term maintainability with TestUnit and RSpec
• Understand and manage complex program flow in Rails controllers
• Leverage Rails’ support for designing REST-compliant APIs
• Master sophisticated Rails routing concepts and techniques
• Examine and troubleshoot Rails routing
• Make the most of ActiveRecord object-relational mapping
• Utilize Ajax within your Rails applications
• Incorporate logins and authentication into your application
• Extend Rails with the best third-party plug-ins and write your own
• Integrate email services into your applications with ActionMailer
• Choose the right Rails production configurations
• Streamline deployment with Capistrano

More resources:

• Editorial review at Amazon.com
• Review for this book at hasmanythrough blog

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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.

xxThroughout, you’ll also see how to cope with common mistakes. You’ll learn how to recognize that you’re in a blind alley and recover from it. You’ll even see examples of the most common typos, so that you’ll recognize the symptoms when you see them.

• Learn to automate rote tasks
• Gain a detailed understanding of working, finished scripts that you can apply directly to your job
• Understand programming terminology and concepts
• Exploit the unpaid labor of others
• Communicate more efficiently and effectively with teammates

Seems like a fun way to spend everyday

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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'

• Run (yes, with just ruby)

    % ruby lyrics.rb
  
    == Sinata has taken the stage on port 4567!

• Take a moment and view the default page localhost:4567. Go ahead and bask in it‘s glory.
• Notice:
  • It didn‘t create any page to show you that default page (just a cool thing to see, that‘s all)
  • There was nothing generated other than a log file
  • Sinatra is a really cool name for a web-framework that‘s a DSL
• Modify lyrics.rb by adding:

    get '/' do
  
      'Hello World'
  
    end

• Refresh (no need to restart Sinatra):

    http://localhost:4567

• Modify again (then refresh):

•   get '/' do
  
      <<-HTML
  
        <form action='/' method="POST">
  
          <input type="text" name="name" />
  
          <input type="submit" value="Say my name!" />
  
        </form>
  
      HTML
  
    end  post '/' do
  
      "Hello #{params[:name] || 'World'}!"
  
    end

• Now you try: Use the Sinatra::Erb::EventContext or Sinatra::Haml::EventContext to do the same. Do them inline and as template files.
• Learn more cool stuff: see Sinatra::Dsl
• Create your own plugins!
  1. Create a ‘vendor’ directory in your app directory
  2. Lay it out like: myapp.rb : root

        |- vendor
     
                     | - plugin_name
     
                   | - init.rb  # load and hook here
     
                   | - lib
     
                         |- modules/classes here

  3. Use it in your app!

For further details visit:

• http://sinatra.rubyforge.org/doc/
• http://www.xnot.org/sinatra
• http://del.icio.us/tag/sinatra

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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.

More resources:

• Bulletproof Web Design at SimpleBits
• Review at haacked.com for the first edition of this book
• Bulleproof Web Design review at 456bereastreet.com

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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.

The book starts with a little bit of a “wow” factor, especially true if you’re new to Ruby on Rails: demonstrating the ease of use of Active Record itself. No configuration needed! Seriously, that’s not the claim of the book but it’s fact of Active Record: all you need is your database credentials and name of the table you want to work with. Everything else is almost magical.

The next sections deal with installing and configuring Active Record. I have to say sometimes (based on my own experiences) it’s not that trivial, especially on Windows. The book guides you through installing drivers/adapters for common and less popular DBMSes. OK, let’s name them: DB2, Firebird, FrontBase, MySQL, OpenBase, Oracle, PostgreSQL, SQLite, Microsoft SQL Server, Sybase, they’re all covered! I was wondering if I can connect to ODBC?

The second chapter deals with the “simple” things, namely, how to do SELECT, UPDATE, DELETE, INSERT, or what you cool guys usually call “CRUD”, the Active Record-way. This information is usually taken for granted, but it’s explained quite deeply in this book.

The next chapter guides you to design your tables so they work smoothly with Active Record. Although you can use legacy designs just fine with Active Record, your life will be much, much easier if you follow Active Record conventions. This book shows you just how, and in many cases, why.

Chapter 4 shows you how to use core Active Record features, including triggers and validations. If you’re asking that question, then the answer is yes, it’s almost completely overlapping with native but proprietary DBMS functionality such as PL/SQL, DBMS triggers, and constraints. The book doesn’t seem to explain much of this holy war, but I encourage you to ask Google why stored procedures are evil.

Chapter 5 gives you a view of Active Record “bonus features”. I think the chapter title is a misnomer because these features are not just bonus, but one of the greatest strengths of Active Record (compared to other ORM). Things like nested sets, lists, observers, aggregations, and little bit of extending Active Record: these are things that you’ll do, and use, daily — not something you try to avoid. They make your life as a DB integrator easier, not the other way around.

You want to make sure your app works fine, chapter 6 covers unit testing very thoroughly, down to the descriptions of errors (i.e. Active Record Exception objects) you may encounter.

If you already had a previous database, as most of us are, no worries, chapter 7 will guide you how to work with them. This is one of the most useful chapters in this book, because there is less information on the Internet on this topic, but it’s very common that everybody is bound to meet this problem. Come on, who actually learned Active Record before hearing the word DBMS?

The last chapter talks about issues that you’ll encounter in the “real world”, including alternatives and related enhancements to Active Record. What follows is the appendix, which is a really useful quick reference.

The book is really, really good. Full of core information, and related information that aren’t readily available even after asking Mr. Google a hundred times. Despite being written by 3 different developers: Kevin Marshall, Chad Pytel, and Jon Yurek; the entire book is nicely structured and feels cohesive. It will save you lots of time in times of frustration, you can look up the information much quickly here than does a search engine.

Interested already? You can get more information about Pro Active Record book on Amazon, and buy it there too of course. It’s also available on Apress official site.

Personal minor gripe, not a flaw, is there wasn’t a (detachable) cheatsheet. A poster-sized, deluxe exclusive cheatsheet would be a tremendous killer plus to this book. I really think Apress should make this kind of thing mandatory in the future, not only regular Appendixes.

Other resources related to this book:

• James Stewart’s review
• Inside Apress blog

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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!

As you can see, the mere act of clicking the bookmarklet shows you some important facts about Arie (or any microformats-enabled you’re currently at). In case of a microformats-enabled resume page like in LinkedIn, it shows you where he works, when, education information, and related stuff. For fun comparison purposes only, my LinkedIn profile has more detailed information than his, hehe

The best part is not only that the information is human-readable, but it can also be extracted and processed automatically by machines or software. The primary distinguishing trait of a microformats-enabled HTML page is that it has semantic meaning. A microformats processor can know the difference between a name, an e-mail address, a street address, a job, a university, and so on; while in plain HTML, all you can infer are things dealing with paragraphs, tables, lists, and so on.

Making microformats-enabled pages aren’t hard at all, actually it is very easy! It’s even much easier than CSS.

To see how simple it is, let’s see a snippet of a real-world microformats, still courtesy of Arie:

<div id="masthead" class="vcard contact">
  <div id="nameplate">
    <h1 id="name"><span class="fn n"> <span class="given-name">Arie</span> <span class="family-name">Kusuma Atmaja</span> </span></h1>
      <p class="headline title"><strong>Senior Ruby Developer at IMT</strong></p>
    <div class="adr">
      <p class="locality">Indonesia</p>
    </div>
  </div>
</div>

Most of the above snippet is just HTML. The microformats part is simply the class=”something“ convention. Simple, and it gets the job done.

Some more commonly used microformats specifications include:

• hCard for people and organizations
• hCalendar for calendars and Events
• hCalendar for calendars and Events
• VoteLinks and hReview for opinions, ratings, and reviews
• XFN for social networks
• rel-license for licenses
• rel-tag for tags, keywords, and categories
• XOXO for lists and outlines
• …and more…

Despite all these specifications, “who uses it?” is a good question. It turns out, there has been many, and more and more sites are adopting it. LinkedIn with hResume is one example, along with Google Maps, Yahoo, Flickr, and all these cool guys have been using them. Why shouldn’t you?

Interested? Here are some stuff to get you started:

1. Online Tools
   1. Microformats Bookmarklet by LeftLogic
      A handy microformats explorer bookmarklet. Useful also if you’re on the go and you want to check out some microformats. No need to install anything fancy on the computer.
   2. Operator Firefox Extension
      Microformats explorer extension for Firefox. Whether you’re a web developer or simply want to check out this latest technology, this is a very useful tool.
   3. Tails Firefox extension is another microformats Firefox extension
   4. Almost Universal Microformats Parser is a useful web-based tool to parse microformats.
2. Tutorials and Resources
   
   1. Microformats, what they are and how to use them, by Smashing Magazine
   2. Microformats Tutorial by XFront
      This is a very extensive tutorial. The complete tutorial package including the example files is a 13 MB download!
   3. How to Use Microformats by Vitamin Features
   4. Introduction to Microformats by WhyMicroformats.com
   5. The Big Picture on Microformats by Digital Web Magazine
   6. Another by Digital Web Magazine: Microformats Primer
   7. Back to the future: Mozilla Firefox 3.0 Does Microformats
      Read/WriteWeb’s articles also touched microformats-related stuff quite often.
3. Microformat Parsers
   1. Mofo Ruby Gem and Rails Plugin
      Of course, this is Ruby on Rails blog! Mofo is a microformats parser for Ruby and it also doubles as a Rails plugin. Check out Chris Wanstrath’s post for more information.
      There are also microformat parsers for other languages:
   2. Sumo is a microformats parser for JavaScript
   3. hKit is a microformats parser for PHP
   4. Microformats Parser is another parser for PHP
   5. Microformats Parser for Python
   6. Hpricot Ruby Gem
      Found a bizarre microformat or inventing your own? No problem, Hpricot comes to the rescue. Parse any HTML-ish document as you see fit… More info available from this RedHanded post.
   7. scrAPI is another Ruby library for parsing HTML that can be useful for processing microformats.
4. References
   1. Microformats.org
      “Official” web site of Microformats. You can read everything about microformats, current specifications and newly proposed specs.
   2. “Microformats: Empowering Your Markup for Web 2.0″ Book by John Allsopp
      <br />
      This is the first book dedicated to, and is a comprehensive guide to, microformats. It explores why, in Bill Gates’s words, “We need microformats”; how microformats work; and the kinds of problems microformats help solve. the book covers every current microformat, with complete details of the syntax, semantics, and uses of each, along with real-world examples and a comprehensive survey of the tools available for working with them. the book also features case studies detailing how major web content publishers such as yahoo put microformats to work in their web applications.
   3. Brian Suda’s microformats cheatsheet
      For people who likes it quick and done, this is perfect. It lists microformats properties by format and also lists each format and the hierarchy. This includes elemental microformats, compound microformats and some of the standard design patterns used.
   4. Dave Child’s microformats cheatsheet is another good reference
   5. And more cheatsheets on microformats.org wiki
   6. Gleaning Resource Descriptions from Dialects of Languages (GRDDL) is a recently approved W3C Recommendation that can be used, among others, for extracting semantic information (including microformats) from HTML pages.
   7. microformatique. A blog about all things microformats!

Feel free to add more resources as you see fit, in the comments!

Updates:

1. I originally thought I was gonna list 10 resources… But it seems there are much more
2. More links to John Allsopp’s resources

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