CSC/ECE 517 Fall 2009/wiki1b 7 b5

Resources for Ruby (other than IDEs)

Language Resources

The Ruby Homepage

The main page for the Ruby language provides the installation files, documentation, and useful resources. Also, for any questions not answered by the following resources you can try the Community tab. There you'll find a list of Ruby community sites where you can get additional support and information.

The Little Book of Ruby

The Little Book of Ruby is an introduction to Ruby that quickly gets you started with Ruby programming. At only 90 pages (.pdf) and using simple, clear language, it's a very quick read. It assumes the reader has prior programming experience, though not necessarily in an object oriented language. All of the code used in the book is also available online.

Ruby QuickRef

Ruby QuickRef is an excellent resource for quickly looking up Ruby syntax. Rather than giving paragraphs of explanation and loads of examples, it simply provides the syntax in a well sectioned and easy to read format. Think of it as a Ruby cheat sheet.

RubyLearning

The tutorial on RubyLearning provides more and larger code samples than the Little Book of Ruby. It also covers a few more niche topics. In particular note the "summary" pages, which provide a quick checklist of topics covered in the preceding sections. Skimming the summary pages will let you quickly decide if there's any new material to learn without having to read the whole thing. The direct link to the tutorial is here.

Testing

Cucumber

Cucumber allows black box tests to be written in plain English, making test documentation and comprehension much easier. It also inherently promotes evaluation of the business value of the things you are testing, which is always a good idea.

Watir

Watir and its sister projects give you hooks into various web browsers for web based black box testing. Alternatively, Celerity allows testing without requiring a browser, which results in faster, platform independent tests.

Debugging

ruby-debug

ruby-debug allows for easy command line debugging, which is helpful for those of us who still cling to text editors. The screencast available at this location does an excellent overview of what ruby-debug can do.

Aptana

This is the Aptana documentation on using the ruby-debug-ide gem with Eclipse. It provides step by step images depicting a debug session.

Other Libraries of Interest

Flickraw

Flickraw provides a Ruby interface to the Flickr API. The Flickr API allows many operations like search, photo upload, and creation of photosets.

Twitter

The Twitter Ruby gem provides a Ruby interface to the Ruby API. Similar to Flickraw, this gem allows the common Twitter operations to be executed in a Ruby environment.

Ruby Projects

RubyForge

RubyForge is basically SourceForge for only Ruby based projects. Learn about Ruby and Ruby development by seeing actual applications of the language, or contribute your own knowledge to a project.