Posted by Daniel Butler
Tue, 25 Apr 2006 11:37:00 GMT
Jeremy McAnally has a new Ruby on Rails book in the works, joining the minions about to be released. Entitled Mr. Neighborly's Relevant Ramblings, Pointed Pontifications, and Thought Theories on Ruby & Rails, the
self-published book will be based on Rails 1.1 and Ruby 1.8.4. The first chapter, a 60-page Rails tutorial is available for free on the web.
The tutorial serves as a thorough introduction to Ruby syntax, classes, methods, modules, and things like regular expressions, spelled out clearly with a rich sauce of examples. So, if you found Why's (Poignant) Guide to Ruby just too "entertaining" a way to learn Ruby, or you don't won't your boss to think you're having too much fun on the job, give this one a try.
Mr. Neighborly Rails Book Site
Posted in Ruby on Rails, Programming | 1 comment
Posted by Daniel Butler
Fri, 21 Apr 2006 16:11:00 GMT
Rethinking CS101 is a project to develop a curriculum for the first course in computer science based around the idea of computation as interaction.
Perhaps the most fundamental idea in modern computer science is that of interactive processes. Computation is embedded in a (physical or virtual) world; its role is to interact with that world to produce desired behavior. While von Neumann serial programming is based on the idea that "computation as calculation" uses inputs at the beginning to produce outputs at the end. "Computation as interaction" treats inputs as things that are monitored and outputs as actions that are taken over the lifetime of an ongoing process. By beginning with a decomposition in terms of interacting computational processes, we can teach our students a model of the world much closer to the one that underlies the thinking of most computer professionals.
Rethinking CS101
Posted in Programming | Tags education, science | no comments
Posted by Daniel Butler
Sat, 15 Apr 2006 14:17:00 GMT
Two-hundred and fifty six colors in your Unix terminal, you ask? Yes, it's possible, but 256-color support isn't very common among the terminal emulators out there (Konsole and Gnome-Terminal don't support it yet). And elinks is the only program I know of that supports 256 colors natively. So, here's a little Ruby program that generates 256-color color cubes in Ruby. I've translated it from a Perl script, so it's not very ruby-like, but it makes pretty pictures.
The source code follows.
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Posted in Ruby, Programming | 5 comments
Posted by Daniel Butler
Fri, 14 Apr 2006 15:28:00 GMT
Camping is a micro—nay! nano— development framework for web-connected applications, like blogs,
to do lists, or other teeny utilities. Version 1.4 is out, and why the lucky stiff nourishes our collective intellect with this:
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Posted in Ruby, Programming | Tags camping, framework, ruby | no comments
Posted by Daniel Butler
Fri, 14 Apr 2006 00:18:00 GMT
Ruby on Rails has breached the walls at Oracle.com. In, Ruby on Rails on Oracle: A Simple Tutorial,
technologist Richard Monson-Haefel describes the advantages and disadvantages of Using Ruby on Rails. His summary in "What is Ruby? What is Rails?" is particularly compelling:
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Posted in Ruby on Rails, Programming | no comments
Posted by Daniel Butler
Thu, 13 Apr 2006 21:36:00 GMT
DevTower is "used to synchronize the development of Ruby On
Rails applications with developers working simultaniously
on multiple systems with Subversion." It enforces certain group-development practices which help protect your schema and data from renegade developers or commit mistakes.
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Posted in Ruby on Rails, Programming | Tags collaboration, database, development, ruby | no comments
Posted by Daniel Butler
Thu, 13 Apr 2006 19:47:00 GMT
Need to find palindromic words in ruby? Try this:
long_palindromes = File.open("/usr/share/dict/words").select {
|w| w.chomp!; w.reverse == w && w.length > 3 }
puts long_palindromes.join(', ')
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Posted in Programming, Ruby | no comments
A Pair of Mangroves, Everglades (March 2003)
