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That code is legal Ruby! If you ran it, you'd see 8. How? There's a tale to tell.. The String with the Golden Space I was on IRC in #nwrug enjoying festive cheer with fellow Northern Rubyists when ysr23 presented a curious problem. He was using a Twitter library that returned a tweet, "@twellyme film", in a string called reply. The problem was that despite calling reply.split, the string refused t

Ruby Weekly is a weekly newsletter covering the latest Ruby and Rails news. (credit: yarrg) This morning, Pete Forde of Unspace prodded me to write about a new book, "Beginning Rails" by Jeffrey Allan Hardy and Cloves Carneiro Jr. (with Hampton Catlin). And, when I receive my copy from Apress, I will be reviewing it here. Of more immediate interest to me, however, was a note that David Heinemeier

Ruby Weekly is a weekly newsletter covering the latest Ruby and Rails news. Treetop is one of the most underrated, yet powerful, Ruby libraries out there. If you want to write a parser, it kicks ass. The only problem is unless you're into reading up about and playing with parsers, it's not always obvious how to get going with them, or Treetop in particular. Luckily Aaron Gough, Toronto-based Ruby

In math, a unary operation is an operation with a single input. In Ruby, a unary operator is an operator which only takes a single 'argument' in the form of a receiver. For example, the - on -5 or ! on !true. In contrast, a binary operator, such as in 2 + 3, deals with two arguments. Here, 2 and 3 (which become one receiver and one argument in a method call to +). Ruby only has a handful of unary

Ruby Weekly is a weekly newsletter covering the latest Ruby and Rails news. The Ruby standard library (a.k.a. stdlib) is a collection of Ruby libraries that, at one time or another, have been considered useful enough to include with the MRI Ruby implementation by standard. Due to the popularity of these libraries, other Ruby implementations have then tended to re-implement or include the standard

Ruby Weekly is a weekly newsletter covering the latest Ruby and Rails news. Recently, there have been many screencasts of people coding things in real time. Yesterday, Ryan Bigg released a video of him implementing Conway's Game of Life from scratch by reading through the 'rules' and then using RSpec to take a test driven approach to fleshing out the functionality. Ryan is a Ruby Hero and technica

Ruby Weekly is a weekly newsletter covering the latest Ruby and Rails news. In Rubyists Already Use Monadic Patterns, Dave Fayram made a passing reference to using ||= to set a variable's value if its value were 'Nothing' (false or nil in Ruby). The resulting Reddit quickly picked up on his definition (which was fixed later) and argued about ||='s true meaning which isn't as obvious as many Rubyis

Ruby Weekly is a weekly newsletter covering the latest Ruby and Rails news. On August 1, 2011, Ruby 1.9.3 preview 1 was released. The final version isn't yet out (as of September 23) but Ruby 1.9.3 is going to be the next, full production-level release of MRI Ruby. But what's the deal with 1.9.3 (and its successors, Ruby 1.9.4 and 2.0)? Keep reading! The Summary Ruby 1.9.3 is a relatively minor im

Ruby Weekly is a weekly newsletter covering the latest Ruby and Rails news. Despite RSpec's awesomeness, Test::Unit remains the most popular Ruby testing tool out there outside of Rails apps. I've recently been code walking through a lot of Ruby libraries for my Ruby Reloaded course and the typical arrangement is Test::Unit, sometimes coupled with Shoulda or Contest for some extra syntactic sweetn

Ruby Weekly is a weekly newsletter covering the latest Ruby and Rails news. rbenv is a new lightweight Ruby version management tool built by Sam Stephenson (of 37signals and Prototype.js fame). The established leader in the Ruby version management scene is RVM but rbenv is an interesting alternative if you want or need something significantly lighter with fewer features. Think of it as a bit like

Ruby Weekly is a weekly newsletter covering the latest Ruby and Rails news. In the past couple of months I've seen situations arise where developers aren't entirely sure how Ruby has chosen to interpret their code. Luckily, Ruby 1.9 comes with a built-in library called Ripper that can help solve the problem (there's a 1.8 version too, see later). Here, I give the 30 second rundown on what to do. A

Ruby Weekly is a weekly newsletter covering the latest Ruby and Rails news. A few months ago, Ruby Inside wrote about using Spork with RSpec 2 and Rails 3 in order to get a more sprightly spec run. Unfortunately, using the techniques in the article with our fledgling codebase's test suite left us with somewhat disappointing results, so I decided to dig deeper and see if I could do better. Note: Th

Ruby Weekly is a weekly newsletter covering the latest Ruby and Rails news. Official project sites should set the benchmark for standards relating to that project in terms of the best quality and most up to date news updates, documentation, download links, tutorials, and so forth. On this front, Ruby's official site at ruby-lang.org is doing a bad job (in the English language variant, at least). U

Ruby Weekly is a weekly newsletter covering the latest Ruby and Rails news. Amazon has unveiled an official Ruby SDK for AWS! Amazon.com's Amazon Web Services has been a rip-roaring success since its first publicly-available service, S3 (Simple Storage Storage), was released in 2006. It has since expanded to about 20 services in all, the most popular being S3 and the "elastic compute cloud" EC2. T

Ruby Weekly is a weekly newsletter covering the latest Ruby and Rails news. Messaging in the context of application architecture (grandly referred to as message oriented middleware on Wikipedia) is similar to messaging in the real world. If you want to ask your colleague to do something, you'll send him a message of some sort. And if your app needs to ask another app to do something it can do the

Ruby Weekly is a weekly newsletter covering the latest Ruby and Rails news. Xavier Shay is an Australian Rubyist who shares an issue with most of us: slow loading Rails 3 apps on Ruby 1.9.2! Unlike most of us, he put together a solution for ruby-head (what I'm calling 1.9.3 but isn't technically*) that, in my own tests, slashed 37% off the boot time of my Rails 3.0 app. He shared his work just a w

Ruby Weekly is a weekly newsletter covering the latest Ruby and Rails news. Maybe I'm weird (actually, there's no maybe about it) but when I first heard about Rails 3.1 getting CoffeeScript and Sass out of the box, I wanted to see how it worked and how smooth the process would be. So like quite a few people on IRC I've seen, I installed edge Rails (currently 3.1.0-beta) and got playing. (Yes, it's

Ruby Weekly is a weekly newsletter covering the latest Ruby and Rails news. Guess what? Yep, the forthcoming Rails 3.1 is going to be bringing in a few new friends as dependencies: CoffeeScript, jQuery, and Sass. What does this mean? Why has this been controversial? I'm going to quickly run through the details here. jQuery - A Non-Controversial Switch It was back in March (2011) when David Heineme

Ruby Weekly is a weekly newsletter covering the latest Ruby and Rails news. As an outspoken and opinionated guy, David Heinemeier Hansson (a.k.a. DHH), creator of Rails, is no stranger to a little bit of controversy. He frequently sets off interesting debates on Twitter from his @dhh account. The latest is, perhaps, the most involved yet and has been rattling on for a couple of hours today. So wha

Ruby Weekly is a weekly newsletter covering the latest Ruby and Rails news. Monkey-patching is so 2010. We're in the future, and with Github and Bundler there is now rarely a need to monkey-patch Ruby code in your applications. Monkey-patching is the dangerous-yet-frequently-useful technique of re-opening existing classes to change or add to their behavior. For example, if I have always felt that

Ruby Weekly is a weekly newsletter covering the latest Ruby and Rails news. Yes, I'm sad enough to have had this in my calendar for some time but.. it's Ruby's 18th "birthday" today! Happy Birthday Ruby! While this means it can drink, vote, and otherwise join its slightly older friends Perl (24) and Python (21) in the nightclubs of Europe, I was surprised to learn that coming of age in Japan is at

Ruby Weekly is a weekly newsletter covering the latest Ruby and Rails news. Rails 3 is great. RSpec 2 is great. And Ruby 1.9.2 is really great. Getting them all running together and quickly, however, isn't entirely straightforward. In this post I demonstrate how to get everything ticking over along with automatically running, super-snappy test runs. The ultimate outcome is using Ruby 1.9.2 (though

Ruby Weekly is a weekly newsletter covering the latest Ruby and Rails news. Ryan Davis has announced the release of RubyGems 1.5.0. It comes just a month after the release of 1.4 which, notoriously, didn't work with Ruby 1.9.2. These problems have now all been ironed out and Ruby 1.8 and 1.9 users alike can safely upgrade (fingers crossed). RubyGems is the popular (and official - as of Ruby 1.9) R

Ruby Weekly is a weekly newsletter covering the latest Ruby and Rails news. Clever Algorithms is a newly released book by Jason Brownlee PhD that describes 45 algorithms from the Artificial Intelligence (AI) field with Ruby-based examples. It's well produced and, notably, free in its PDF and online formats. A print copy is available at a small cost. The book kicks off with a chapter of background

Ruby Weekly is a weekly newsletter covering the latest Ruby and Rails news. Eloy Duran (of the Dutch Rails consultancy Fingertips) has put together an interesting side project: a WebKit plugin written in MacRuby. His 'MacRubyWebKitPluginExample' project on GitHub is a short, self contained example of how to pull it off, so it's worth checking out if you want to do something similar. Eloy's example

Ruby Weekly is a weekly newsletter covering the latest Ruby and Rails news. Parslet is a new "simple parser framework" for Ruby built by Kaspar Schiess. It follows the PEG (parsing expression grammar) style of parsing and its primary goals are to be simple, testable, and to have extensive and powerful error reporting features (something that Kaspar states Treetop sorely lacks). If you've already u

Ruby Weekly is a weekly newsletter covering the latest Ruby and Rails news. You may imagine that the ruby-core mailing list is a 24/7 programming disco dealing with core Ruby implementation topics.. but no, it's usually a low-traffic list with calm discussion of bugs and patches. This week, however, some Interesting Stuff™ has happened and the kimono has been lifted on a few issues including, nota