A Fresh Cup

• One-Click Ruby Installer looks to be the fastest way to get started with Ruby on Windows – installs the language, extensions, an IDE, and a book to get you started. (via Oleg Tkachenko
• Capistrano & EC2 Sitting in a Tree, K I S S I N G includes Rake tasks and a Capistrano deployment file to make pushing a Rails application up to Amazon EC2 servers simple. Looks like a nice automated solution for scaleable rollouts.

• Gardens Point Ruby.NET Compiler New Beta Release – Ruby on the CLR, and they say they’re working on Rails support. Will be interesting to see whether this actually develops. Done right, it’s possible we could end up with some interesting hybrid where Rails projects could scale sideways to leverage the full IIS management infrastructure, but I’d be surprised if an academic project could pull that off. (via Jeremy D. Miller)
• Rails Google Maps Plugin – The basics to using Yellow Maps 4 Ruby . (via dzone)

A few more to pass along this morning before I get any actual work done.

• What’s new in Ruby 1.9, Feb. 07 update – Possibly by the time Ruby 1.9 comes out, I’ll actually know Ruby 1.8 well enough to know which of these are significant. (via dzone)
• Windows expert to Redmond: Buh-bye – I hate to be mean-spirited, but ComputerWorld’s Scott Finnie is so high profile that it’s hard to resist.
• Converting from Rexml to libxml – Jared Richardson shows how to gain an order of magnitude in XML parsing speed in a Rails application if you need it.

RUBY-DOC.ORG is loaded with online searchable Ruby documentation. This is very useful when you’re using a Web framework based on a language that you don’t really know yet.

Mike Clark has another interesting post today, Getting Started with the Amazon S3 Library for Ruby , exploring yet another spiffy Ruby library. I continue to be impressed with some of the things that people have wrapped up in small amounts of Ruby code – and happy that I don’t have to cart them all around with me in some super-giant-mega framework when I don’t need them.

Another cool resource: cheat sheets features close to 100 command-line cheat sheets for Ruby and associated coding – the one on Capistrano helped me out immensely tonight, and I’ve got my eye on a couple of others (TextMate for Rails, for example). You can access them all online in HTML glory, or

 $ gem install cheat

will bring it into your local system where you can access the cheat sheets directly from the command line.

RubyFurnace is an online repository for Gems and Rails plugins. There are quite a few there already to browse through. I’m guessing more tools for finding the best and most applicable to your own projects are still to come. (via dzone

Ruby 1.8.5 released!

I don’t know which is more annoying – languages that only rev once every few years, or onces that are in a constant state of ferment so you never quite know where the line is between “beta,” “working,” and “deprecated.”

Refactoring, Ruby Edition is the permanent home for the book project I mentioned a couple of days ago.

Jay Fields is tackling a rewrite of the classic Refactoring book to use Ruby as its language (with Martin Fowler’s permission). Here’s the announcement, and here’s the first example bit.

Humble Little Ruby Book

"Apress/On Ruby Blogging Contest":http://on-ruby.blogspot.com/2006/12/apresson-ruby-blogging-contest.html (via "dzone":http://www.dzone.com/rsslinks/apresson_ruby_blogging_contest.html)

I’m not entirely sure yet that Ruby is going to be my next computer language, but it’s time to collect a few links in one place:

• Ruby Programming Language – The main language site
• Ruby Central – All sorts of links and resources
• Ruby QuickRef – Cheat sheet
• Whys (Poignant) Guide to Ruby – Cute online book with cartoons.

Visual Database Explorer in Ruby looks nice and was done with very little code. (via dzone)

This Google Groups post saved me. It certainly wasn’t obvious to me what the problem was.