Rock 'n Ruby (on Rails)

Strata @ Sweet's Ballroom :: 09/02/06
Originally uploaded by evolofoto

Met Hrag C, guitarist with Strata, seen here. We're collaborating on textbull.com with Chris, Purnima, and Goerge. An all-volunteer weekend startup army. After a few year touring, Hrag is back in the area going back to finish school. In addition to music, Hrag does front end web dev and is getting into Ruby like the rest of the army.

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Deeper into R-o-R

After doing a few recipe projects, I've started working on a fresh idea from scratch with Chris Sargisov. It feels much like trying to go around the block without training wheels for the first time.

The project I'm trying to do (more on this later - when there is stuff to show) has quickly taken me down the path of polymorphic many-to-many relationships with Ruby Active Record. I'm getting my a** kicked but understanding it better with every error message - thanks for Eldon Alameda, again.

If you're also into HABTM, many-to-many, has_many :through then here are a few links that Eldon turned me on to that you might find as useful as I did:

• Ryan Bate's Railscast Screencast
• Josh Susser's blog
• Gregg Pollack's screencast on ActiveRecord
• Bala Paranj's RubyPlus Ruby and Rails screencasts
  

Drop me a line if you know of others...

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My Ruby Arsinal

A few friends have asked about the books I'm using on Ruby - here they are (in order purchased - thanks for Sanjay for one of the recommendations and to Alex for a couple others):

• Practical Rails Projects by Eldon Alameda.
• Programming Rails by Dave Thomas.
• Practical Social Networking Sites by Alan Bradburne.
• Agile Web Development with Rails by Dave Thomans and David Heinemeier Hanson.
• Ruby Cookbook by Lucas Carlson and Leonard Richardson
• Rails Cookbook by Rob Orsini

I bought the books on Amazon - half.com didn't seem to have a price advantage. I usually buy used in good conditions.

I also picked-up the following O'Reily Pocket References:

• MySQL Pocket Reference
• CSS Pocket Reference
  
• PHP Pocket Reference
  

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Practically Rails

I'm spending some time learning Ruby and Rails. The Web today belongs to those that can implement ideas (not just dream them). So I've been dusting off my OO and C++ knowledge which I hadn't used for about 10 years (it's all coming back pretty easily).

I've invested in a couple of books on the subject and one of them is Practical Rails Applications by Eldon Alameda from Apress. From time to time, I'm going to post typos, errata and other notes here as part of this journey.

• Pg36: The index page that is produced for the today controller with Rails 2.0.2 is index.html.erb instead of index.rhtml The book references and older version.
  
• Pg41: The text thats displayed at the end of script/plugin install acts_as_authenticated plugin looks like an error but its not (that part about acts_as being deprecated by restful_authentication).
  
• Pg44: paragraph 3 "we're using it [to] call the login_from_cookie

Last night, I got as far as adding user registration and authentication (using the plug in acts_as_authenticated) in chapter 3 of the book. I ran into a few problems related to the mailer initialization. At the same time, I was tracking down a pesky layout issue on the login and signup pages, unrelated to the mailer issue, when I emailed the author, Eldon Alameda. Eldon responded right away and has been very helpful...

It turns out that the book was written based on Rails 1.2.3 while I was running 2.0 Among the changes is the ActionMailer initialization. So to keep moving forward, I decided to downgrade from InstantRails 2.0 back to InstantRails 1.7 and Rails 1.2.8 (close enough to 1.2.3). A lesson learned for being on the bleeding edge (Rails 2.0 was released late Dec - too new for my taste).

I am redoing the steps starting in Chapter 1.

Here's a trap I fell into a couple of times (the last time around, this was the fork in the road that took me down the path to upgrading to Rails 2.0 which proved problematic): You've just installed mongrel and you're all happy and snug and you do mongrel_rails start to see the fruits of your labor but you see this instead !!! Path to log file not valid: log/mongrel.log

Chances are, your mongrel is installed alright. The thing to remember is that mongrel_rails must run from within a rails app directory (if you use InstantRails and you haven't created a project of your own, go to cookbook or typo sample app directories and start mongrel there. Presto!

My current configuration: Ruby 1.8.6 Rails 1.2.3 mongrel 1.1 gem 0.9.2 rake 0.7.2 apache 1.3.33

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