Gregory Brown's Posts ( feed)

Ruby Mendicant University is a Go!

Details on how to get involved with my new Ruby Mendicant University idea.

2010-06-04 14:50 (View Comments)

IDEA: Ruby Mendicant University

It's time for another one of my crazy ideas: This time, a free online Ruby training program. Please read about it and let me know what you think.

2010-06-03 14:50 (View Comments)

If you want to see the wizard, go to Oz.

The story of how I got involved in Ruby, and made one of the best friends anyone could ask for. And also, why you should be registering for Red Dirt RubyConf right now.

2010-04-21 14:50 (View Comments)

rubyproblems.com is now live!

I'm pleased to announce the launch of rubyproblems.com, a new Ruby learning resource that readers of RBP are sure to enjoy.

2010-04-07 14:50 (View Comments)

Full Book Now Available For Free!

As of today, you can download the full PDF copy of my book "Ruby Best Practices". I have also put the manuscript and production sources out there, so contributors can start to play with things as they see fit. Click through for details.

2010-03-17 16:50 (View Comments)

Ruby Tuesdays: RBP Chapter 7

This week, we have the Reducing Cultural Barriers chapter of Ruby Best Practices available for reading and discussion. In it, you'll learn about some multilingualization and localization techniques, including a bit about how encodings work in Ruby 1.9.

2010-03-09 14:00 (View Comments)

Ruby Tuesdays: RBP Chapter 6

This week, we have the When Things Go Wrong chapter of Ruby Best Practices available for reading and discussion. In it, you'll find practical tips that will make troubleshooting your Ruby code a whole lot easier.

2010-03-02 07:00 (View Comments)

Ruby Tuesdays: RBP Chapter 5

This week, we have the Functional Programming Techniques chapter of Ruby Best Practices available for reading and discussion.

2010-02-23 15:00 (View Comments)

Ruby Tuesdays: RBP Chapter 4

After a short delay, the Text Processing and File Management chapter of Ruby Best Practices is now available for you to read and discuss.

2010-02-16 15:00 (View Comments)

RBP is useless without you

If you were expecting to see Chapter 4 released today, unfortunately, it's not going to happen this week. See the main post for details.

2010-02-12 05:24 (View Comments)

Weekend Reading: RBP Chapters 2-3

Releasing Chapter 2 and 3 of my book, "Ruby Best Practices". Last week's comments on Chapter 1 were great, so hopefully we can keep that up this week.

2010-02-05 14:00 (View Comments)

Weekend Reading: RBP Chapter 1

From the time I began writing the "Ruby Best Practices" book, I knew I'd eventually release it under a Creative Commons license. It's now time to start that process. This post releases the book's first chapter, "Driving Code Through Tests".

2010-01-29 14:32 (View Comments)

Reflections from "The Compleat Rubyist"

Reflections on our recent training event The Compleat Rubyist, held January 22-23 in Tampa, FL. Everybody learned a ton, including us instructors.

2010-01-25 15:36 (View Comments)

Learning From Bad Ideas

A common way of studying the game of Go is to work backwards from a bad position to discover what a better move would have been. In this article, I'll show you how to do that with Ruby code as well.

2009-11-22 22:57 (View Comments)

Be Nice and Have Fun

In the wake of yet another Ruby drama scene, there is one community Best Practice that always works.

2009-08-21 11:25 (View Comments)

Should I Tap that Hash? (Ruby 1.9 Style)

Ruby 1.9 gives us Object#tap, which is immediately useful for some benign purposes. But lately I've been getting more creative and can use some peer review to tell me if what I'm doing is elegant or ugly.

2009-08-05 12:00 (View Comments)

25th Post!

This is the 25th post since RBP blog started up. Let us know what you think of how things have gone so far.

2009-07-07 05:00 (View Comments)

Code Blocks: Ruby's Swiss Army Knife

A complete section excerpted from the "Designing Beautiful APIs" chapter of my O'Reilly book, Ruby Best Practices.

2009-07-07 04:00 (View Comments)

The Decorator Delegator Disco

In response to Aaron Patterson's "Double Dispatch Dance", we'll take a look at another way to get funky with design patterns. Go read his post first if you haven't already.

2009-06-27 16:00 (View Comments)

Quack Attack: Making Your Code More Rubyish

Often times, when a newbie tries to make their code more "Rubyish", it means using some cute meta-programming hack that experienced hackers would never use due to its obscurity or fragility. However, the Ruby Way isn't just an urban myth, nor is it some dark secret held tightly by its masters. In this article, we'll look at a simple but powerful API design technique that will make your code more "Rubyish" without invoking any deep voodoo.

2009-06-09 13:00 (View Comments)

RubySpec as a Community Resource (Interview w. Brian Ford)

I caught up with Brian Ford to ask a few questions about RubySpec, the effort to describe Ruby through BDD style specs. With any luck, after reading his responses, you'll be as excited about this awesome effort as I am.

2009-06-04 07:52 (View Comments)

Reading Ruby's Standard Library for Fun and Profit

The more code we read, the more we learn about our craft. No self-respecting Rubyist should go without reading at least bits and pieces of Ruby's standard library, so I'd like to get you started on that journey today.

2009-05-24 18:25 (View Comments)

Hello World (Literally)

A quick look at of a map of where in the world our traffic has come from in the last few days, along with a few questions for our readers.

2009-05-05 06:42 (View Comments)

Fun with Class.new

Building anonymous classes may sound a bit esoteric, but they can actually come in handy in a number of ways. I've collected three and a half of my favorite tricks for your enjoyment.

2009-04-30 17:55 (View Comments)

Rails Modularity for Lazy Bastards

If given the choice, would you rather maintain one gigantic Rails application, or a handful of smaller ones? Using some simple organizational techniques along with ActiveResource, you can still tackle the big problems without the big headaches that come along with monolithic systems.

2009-04-16 04:31 (View Comments)

Welcome to the RBP blog

This blog will hopefully be a great community resource for Ruby developers who are constantly in search of better coding practices and techniques. Although it'll be a few days before things get rolling, I'm happy to announce the project and the great group of collaborators we've put together.

2009-04-07 17:02 (View Comments)