Ruby Source Newsletter

Ruby golf is the art of writing code that uses as few characters as possible. The idea originated in the world of Perl (unsurprisingly known as Perl Golf). As a language, Perl is well-suited to this as it has more than its fair share of bizarre constructs and syntactic sugar. 

Class variables in Ruby have a bad name. It’s true, they are considered a borderline evil. So why the bad rap? Most complaints are about how they behave when inheritance enters the fray. Correction: It’s all how they behave compared to what we expect.

Need professional icons but don’t want to pay a fortune? The
Reflection Icon Set has got you covered! It includes over 200 icons
perfectly suited for mobile and web apps. The icons are provided as both raster and vector for easy editing. Use them for free for personal and commercial projects (no attribution required). How sweet is that?

By now, we’ve all seen Twitter Bootstrap – it’s a great CSS and JavaScript library open sourced by Twitter that makes it easy to produce a very polished looking site. It has fantastic support for layout, navigation, typography, and much more.

To some, cutting gems is considered an art for the minerally inclined. In the Ruby world, however, gem cutting is a matter of life. Creating RubyGems can be easy, but also poses a trap for the novice.

In this post, I want to finally get the Occasions MVC sequence done. This is the seventh post in the series, and I thought we’d be farther by now. Those responsible for our less-than-expected progress have been sacked.

5 minutes tops – we promise! Complete the survey by November 30th and you’ll go into the draw to win an iPad 2. Thanks for your feedback, and a big thank you for being part of the SitePoint community!

In this, the latest in the Looking Outside Ruby series, we’re going to have a look at server-side JavaScript with Node. Node is a set of libraries that enable JavaScript to run outside the browser, where the JavaScript in question is the V8 engine from Chrome.