CSCI E-168

I’ve been paging through a new book, Practical Rails Projects, by Eldon Alameda, and so far, I’m pretty impressed.

Here are some of the highlights so far:

Chapters 2, 4, and 5: Creating an “interesting” app, leveraging a similar knowledge base to what you are learning in this course. Going through these chapters could lock in what you’ve learned. One thing I like here is that he uses the standard vocabulary of Rails, and doesn’t slow down a whole lot: It’s pretty lean.

Chapter 3: Adapting the acts_as_authenticated plugin to an existing app.

Chapter 6: Adding a REST (web services) interface. Good discussion of using the curl application to test it. Up-to-date account of authentication issues with REST and acts_as_authenticated

Chapter 7: Adding graphics: charts and (my favorite) sparklines.

Then it really gets interesting, as there is a whole chapter studying the code organization of Typo (best blogging software for Rails, though abandoned by many because WordPress is so dominant with its useful plugins, mindshare, etc.).

All that is just in the first third of the book. I will likely review this on my blog in a few weeks; stay tuned. [Amazon]

Folks,

Check out Amy’s guide to choosing and using plugins: http://www.thirdbit.net/articles/2007/11/19/amy’s-guide-to-choosing-and-using-rails-plugins-with-bonus-checklist/

I wrote a review for my blog of the new book Pro Active Record; the review is here: http://7fff.com/2007/11/09/pro-active-record-book-review/

I can recommend it to students who have done lots of relational and/or another ORM framework, but it might be tough-going for beginners, and, as I say in the review, it has gaps.

Meanwhile, the other day I skimmed Beginning Rails by Hardy, et al., also on APress, and it’s surprisingly good, at least in the bits I focused on. I haven’t looked closely at the sections on ActiveRecord, but if anyone is reading it, I’d be curious to know what you think.

If you’re reading other books, articles, blogs, on Ruby, Rails, etc., by all means post a review or comment in our books section. If you find a resource that is truly outstanding, I’ll get it and add my own review to our annotated list of resources.

Also, I notice that I hadn’t actually published that “John’s To-dos” page. It’s there now.

I have to pick and choose a bit for ActiveRecord topics; we actually have two weeks for this, and I got rdoc and Test::Unit out of the way, so, really, you should get your key knowledge earlier (which will help for the assignment). The first lecture will begin with the briefest relational/SQL refresher.

Basically I am trying to identify the core aspects of the relational model so that I can show how each one is dealt with in ActiveRecord.

Below are the topics that I think are most important.

Requests for you:

• If you feel like you need more than the briefest relational/SQL refresher, speak up. I can provide, for example, a PDF of some pages to help you re-activate that knowledge.
• If there are other things (besides what’s below) you want to hear about based on your experience with relational databases and SQL, make comments.

ActiveRecord Menu

1. Migrations
2. Creating a class that leverages ActiveRecord
3. Key datatypes
4. Basic Create / Read / Update / Delete operations
5. Validations
6. How ActiveRecord manages 1:Many and Many:Many relationships; and how ActiveRecord manages data related to the Many:Many relationship (e.g., join tables)
7. How ActiveRecord models relational “group by”
8. How ActiveRecord manages aggregate functions
9. How ActiveRecord manages what would be suitable for left join
10. How ActiveRecord provides single-table inheritance

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Things that I will mention but will not detail:

• ActiveRecord and transactions
• Polymorphic associations

Someone in my section asked about debuggers for ruby code, and I said something unhelpful like “What’s wrong with puts?!” but promised to get back to them with something more useful. So if you want to, go read about Ruby-Debug here.

So my last posting on feeds was everything but my Ruby/Rails RSS feeds and engineering feeds.

Here are my biggies.

General engineering / software / project management

• Rands in Repose (Already mentioned)
• Joel on Software - (Also on Amy’s list.) This was one of the first blogs to sum up a body of common knowledge regarding software, project manager, and software business practices. No one thing Joel Spolsky said was particularly astounding, but the general strand of good sense was highly valuable. Among other things, Spolsky has well-defended the idea that great developers need great offices, great tools, decent pay, and the right amount of work. Not much new stuff from Joel recently.
• That’s really it.
• There are some other bloggers that I’ve been avid for in the past, such as Jeremy Zawodny, Matt Raible, Phil Windley, James Gosling, Cameron Purdy, Eric Sink, and others, but it’s amazing how a lot of these folks have cooled off. Also, sometimes bloggers become quasi-famous, and then they think they can blog about whatever they want. But guess what, I was interested in their core competency. So they get unsubscribed.

Ruby and Rails

• Amy and I both subscribe to Err the Blog, Rails Envy, Jamis Buck, Amy Hoy, Nuby on Rails, Riding Rails, and Loud Thinking. See Amy’s post to get those URLs.
• Headius, Charles Nutter’s blog on JRuby.
• Ruby Inside, the blog of Peter Cooper, author of Beginning Ruby.
• Ola Bini’s blog; Ola is a developer at ThoughtWorks who contributes to JRuby. Ola seems to be one of the smartest bloggers out there. I learn something from every post.
• O’Reilly Ruby. The best posts are by Greg Brown, who has talked to the Boston Ruby Group.
• Rubylution - This one has a nice post on operator precedence that builds on what I warned you about regarding and, &&, &.

That’s enough for now. Let the group know if you find any interesting blogs that are relevant to the course.

Short version: nothing beats Textmate, though he hopes someday something will.

So John asked me to offer up my feeds for general consumption. It’s interesting to see that the feeds John posted about don’t coincide at all with the ones I will tell you about, even though I know we read at least some of the same ones. (For example, he emailed me the day that Ruby Inside flagged my method_missing article. Do I talk about that method_missing articleway too much, or what? I could talk about how I was the star quarterback on my high school football team instead…)

Rails blogs

Most, but not all, of these blogs are run by rails-core contributors

David Black, who wrote Ruby for Rails.
Courtenay’s blog at Caboo.se. See his Sample Rails App, too.
Err the Blog, run by PJ Hyett and Chris Wanstrath.
Rails Envy, run by Gregg Pollack and Jason Seifer
Ezra Zygmuntowicz, of Engine Yard

Rick Olson, aka Technoweenie, doesn’t blog much, but he’s very important in the rails world, so I’m throwing him in here anyway, because you should know who he is and what he does.

Dr Nic
Jamis Buck
Kevin Clark
Amy Hoy at slash7: intersection of rails and design
The thoughtbot people are local, this is their group blog.
Obie Fernandez
Stuart Eccles
Working With Rails
The Rails Way, run by Jamis Buck and Michael Koziarski (koz)
Polishing Ruby, by zenspider, aka Ryan Davis, author of, among other things, the popular zentest.

Nuby on Rails, run by Geoffrey Grosenbach (topfunky), who also runs peepcode. I think PeepCode is probably pretty good, if you like screencasts, which I actually don’t. I don’t like to learn from moving, talking things. ( If you’re looking for free rails screencasts, there’s also Ryan Davis’s railscast site, but again with the disclaimer that I don’t watch screencasts unless I have to (Hi John! LinkWizz, indeed! It did annoy me). The Ruby on Rails podcast is big, but I like listening just about as much as I like watching and listening, so I haven’t yet brought myself to listen even to the women in development podcasts, which you’d think I’d just be so totally all over. On the other hand, Jay Fields (of Thoughtworks, see below) sings that he believes the screencasts are our future, teach them well and let them lead the way, show them all the beauty that they’ve got inside…, so maybe I’ll adapt.)

Andre Lewis does some mapping/rails stuff

Riding Rails is the ‘official’ rubyonrails blog.

DHH’s blog is Loud Thinking. Of course it would be called that.

Ruby (and not much rails) blogs

_why is now blogging at hackety.org, but his defunct blog redhanded is worth perusing too.

O’Reilly’s Ruby blogs

Ruby Fleebie
Ruby Quiz, James Edward Gray II, who also wrote Textmate: Power Editing for the Mac.

The Boston Ruby Group
Ruby News at ruby-lang.org

Groups

I subscribe to the aggregated blogs of the ThoughtWorks people. Thoughtworks leans Ruby and Rails when it can; and in any case is full of smart people writing interesting things about software development, much of which is over my head, but edifying nonetheless.

PragProg people: I subscribe to most of the blogs of the people associated with the Pragmatic Programmers. They’re all good, the number of posts are not too overwhelming, and like the thoughtworks blogs, they frequently cover ruby and rails topics (many of them are ruby-core and/or rails-core; Dave Thomas was and remains instrumental in spreading the gospel of Ruby here in the States and worldwide, and in general anything that comes out of their shop is worth knowing about. I can’t wait till their TDD with Rails workshop comes to Boston). Anyway, here they are: Dave Thomas, Chad Fowler, Jim Weirich, Andy Hunt, and Mike Clark.

DevChix is a group blog for women developers. Not as active as I wish it were, but then again, I don’t contribute, do I, so who am I to complain? Some ruby stuff, some python stuff, some other stuff.

Finally, 3 General Software Development Blogs I read

Coding Horror
Joel on Software
Steve McConnell

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If this is all too complicated for you (and believe me, now that I’ve written it all down like this, it seems all too complicated for me too, but in practice I don’t actually read most of these things, I just glance at them and then pick a couple of items to read), then just subscribe to PlanetRubyOnRails and call it a day. But at least look at this list, because I’ve tried to include most of the people whose names and aliases you should get to know as you’re learning ruby and rails. Oh wait, I forgot Zed Shaw, who wrote Mongrel. I am sure I have left out other important people too, but I am really, really tired of this post now.

Oh, and if you’ve got kids, or know people who do (and if you don’t know people who’ve got kids, then whoa, time to expand your circle; it takes a village, you know…), then I highly recommend Parent Hacks.

*Someone please take away my post titling privs; I simply cannot stop abusing alliteration!

Another new interview with DHH, this time at InfoWorld. Make sure to have your popup blocker on!

http://www.infoworld.com/article/07/08/31/Rails-creator-on-Java-and-other-junk_1.html?source=NLC-AD&cgd=2007-09-06