The Ruby community responds to Dreamhost’s complaints about Rails deployment. I actually thought that Dreamhost’s complaints were constructive¹, they run a large-scale host, and they get the Debian-aspects of it really well. I would be much more interested in Rails if deployment was as easy as bootstrapping is.

1. Not everyone did ↩

Here’s a good Friday afternoon read: Java is the right answer to the wrong question (and Ruby the wrong answer to the right question). My 0×02 bits: why do I find Java codebases with 75 character member names, and why is Ruby only popular slathered in framework? Or maybe those are bad measures?

A good list of Things That Newcomers to Ruby Should Know.

Miscellaneous Thoughts for Programmers talks about avoiding the hard stuff. It quotes the classic Ruby versus Java myths page:

In what serious discipline is “It’s too hard” a legitimate excuse? I have never seen a bank that eschews multiplication: “We use repeated addition here–multiplication was too hard for our junior staffers.” And I would be uncomfortable if my surgeon said, “I refuse to perform procedures developed in the last 10 years–it is just too hard for me to learn new techniques.”

Here’s some learnin’ on ActiveRecord Associations. They’re the construct you use to inflict foreign references on your ActiveRecord tables.

Ruport is a Ruby reporting library that can hook into ActiveRecord, CSV, or SQL/DBI. It has a simple formatting language, can produce PDFs and graphs, and even does some code generation to make things easy.

Ruby on Rails, from the point of view of a PHP developer, an article about the differences between Ruby and Php — both in the languages, and in how they are used to build web applications.

HacketyHack, “the coder’s starter kit” is a free, odd/funny/interesting Ruby training program.

Capistrano (formerly known as SwitchTower) is the defacto utility for deploying Rails applications.

The official set of online Rails manuals, including a Rails cookbook and a good guide on Rail’s URL routing/rewriting. The docs for a user login plugin and an overview of plugins in general.