Ruby Beginners meetup notes: 2011-10-18

[Igal Koshevoy]

We had a great turnout and lots of excellent discussion. Many thanks to Sam, Sarah and Renewable Funding for hosting us, and everyone that participated.

Some of what we covered included:

• Ruby Koans exercises for learning Ruby: http://rubykoans.com/
• Ruby Monk exercises for learning Ruby: http://rubymonk.com/
• Ruby Toolbox for finding popular libraries for addressing common needs: https://www.ruby-toolbox.com/
• Railscast with very detailed TDD/BDD code and examples of testing with Rails 3.1, RSpec, Guard, FactoryGirl, Capybara, etc: http://railscasts.com/episodes/275-how-i-test
• Ruby Enumerable library API:
• Ruby 1.9.2: http://www.ruby-doc.org/core-1.9.2/Enumerable.html
• Ruby 1.8.7: http://www.ruby-doc.org/core-1.8.7/Enumerable.html
• Sinatra web application library: http://www.sinatrarb.com/
• Ruby on Rails ActiveRecord Associations: http://guides.rubyonrails.org/association_basics.html
• Entity Relationship Diagrams for describing database schemas:
• http://rapidapplicationdevelopment.blogspot.com/2007/06/entity-relationship-diagram-example.html
• http://www2.cs.uregina.ca/~bernatja/crowsfoot.html
• Acts as Tree plugin for ActiveRecord: https://github.com/parasew/acts_as_tree
• ActiveRecord plugins for nested sets: https://www.ruby-toolbox.com/categories/Active_Record_Nesting
• Trees with Ancestry: http://railscasts.com/episodes/262-trees-with-ancestry
• RSpec: https://www.relishapp.com/rspec/docs/gettingstarted
• MiniTest::Spec vs. Test::Unit: http://www.rubyinside.com/a-minitestspec-tutorial-elegant-spec-style-testing-that-comes-with-ruby-5354.html
• Guard, a tool that detects file changes and can run tests automatically, etc: http://rubydoc.info/github/guard/guard/master/frames
• Presenter pattern to simplify controllers and views: http://kpumuk.info/ruby-on-rails/simplifying-your-ruby-on-rails-code/
• DRb, Distributed Ruby: http://segment7.net/projects/ruby/drb/introduction.html
• @dhh: "Added ActiveRecord::Base.store for declaring simple single-column key/value stores in Rails 3.2/master" http://t.co/JwMPZCSC

-igal