April 19, 2010: The Week Begins
Top Story/Book Status
This is the week – Rails Test Prescriptions should go on beta sale on Wednesday.
In a related story, railsrx.com now points to here, railsprescriptions.com also will shortly. I’ll be adding some basic about information and static pages here. At some point, I’ll probably bring over any blog content from the previous site that still seems relevant. I’m not sure if the original free version of Rails Test prescriptions will still be available (it’s becoming out of date, and there will be free samples available at Pragmatic), but I will make it available if anybody is still interested.
Tab Dump
Reg “raganwald” Braithwaite has a brief article on why Ruby needs blocks separately from lambdas, how blocks differ, and when that difference is useful.
A double dose from Yehuda Katz: A slideshow titled “Making your OSS project more like Rails", with some interesting insight on what makes Rails work as a project. And another Bundler article addressing the issue of why Bundler appears to work differently based on the ordering of gems within it. (Short answer: it’s exposing dependency issues in the gems themselves.)
Over at Envylabs, they announced a new gem called Census, which allows you to gather demographic-style data on your users and then search for data based on their answers.
Another Rails 3 intro, this one at IBM Developer Works. I’ve written Rails stuff for them in the past, but I didn’t write this one.
Here’s a nice slideshow in HTML5 that shows off the new features of HTML5.
Finally
NetNewsWire has quickly become one of my indispensable iPad apps. The developer, Brent Simmons, in an attempt to discuss software development, has posted a number of pictures from various stages in the design and implementation of NNW-iPad. Thanks!