Resources for Starting with Ruby on Rails 3

Ruby and Rails (that together form the well-known Ruby on Rails -RoR- combination) have become a de-facto standard in the industry in order to develop small and not-so small Web applications rapidly (RAD).

The Rails framework has contributed directly to the increasing popularity of the Ruby programming language. Rails is based on the MVC design pattern and allows the developers to implement efficiently Web applications incorporating many of the recommendations and best practices of agilists. Rails 3 is the result of the fusion of Merb -another famous MVC framework for Ruby- with the previous Rails version.

In this post I include some links to resources related to Rails 3, the forthcoming version of Rails currently in Beta:

• This post includes a compendium of links to blog posts, tutorials, presentations and conference talks on Rails 3.
• This tutorial allows the reader to learn how to use the GIT version control system and deploy Rails applications on the Cloud using Heroku at the same time you learn Rails 3.
• This, this and this resources will teach you how to implement and manage associations between the models of Rails applications.
• This is a very useful site for learning Rails through screencasts, including lots of examples, tricks and useful libraries/add-ons/pluggins (e.g. Formtastic, RSpec, etc.).
• Finally, this book on the Pragmatic Programmer series (currently in Beta) will be one of the main references for exploiting all the new features of Rails 3.

Hope you find these resources useful for putting hands on Rails 3 :-)

Two Upcoming Books on Programming Languages

Recently, I've paid attention to the following books on programming languages that are going to appear in the following months:

• Seven Languages in Seven Weeks: A Pragmatic Guide to Learning Programming Languages
• Domain Specific Languages

The first one is from Bruce A. Tate -a well known author in Java and Ruby communities- and introduces the reader inside the most important features of 7 different programming languages that are nowadays relevant or will be relevant in the next few years: Ruby, Io, Prolog, Scala, Erlang, Clojure and Haskell. The second one is being written by the omnipresent Martin Fowler and talks about DSLs, that are gaining a lot of attention in the development communities.

Useful Commands for PostgreSQL DBMS

The following commands are very useful to get some meta-information about the data repository in PostgreSQL. In the psql command line put...

# select datname from pg_database;

to get a list of databases in Postgres in the current repository (e.g. the one pointed by $PGDATA env. variable), ...

#\dt

to get a list of the tables of the current database, and...

#select pg_size_pretty(pg_database_size('DBNAME'));

in order to get the size of the database in user readable format.

Technical Bookshops on Computer Science

Today I want to write a post about technical bookshops (both physical and online) and book sites on the web.

Despite everyone knows about Amazon as a very good bookshop and source of information about computer science books, there is another online bookshop that looks very interesting:

• BookDepository: Good catalogue and, in general, cheaper than Amazon.

With regard online free technical books, FreeTechBooks.com is a very good option.

Moreover, I like to touch the physical books (I like their format and appearance), so from time to time I use to visit (some of the few) physical libraries in Madrid. These are the ones I like to go:

• Cocodrilo Libros (Madrid): This is my favorite bookshop. They have a good and extensive catalogue of technical books in english in their bookshop and, the most important thing, they offer you a very good personal treatment.
• Librería Diaz de Santos (Madrid): They also have a good catalogue of english books, but it is not close to the city center.
• Casa del Libro (Madrid): They used to have books in english but since three years ago, they just have books in spanish.
• FNAC (Madrid): Just books in spanish, mainly for beginners.

Can you recomend any other library/resource you known in your town or in the web?