Later this year I am going to hold a beginners course for Ruby at the VHS in Karlsruhe. Yesterday I started thinking about the topics I want to cover. The participants will have some programming experience which means I don’t have to explain the very basics. The course runs for two days with six hours each day, so I will have 12 hours to teach them Ruby. From the tutorials I read, I liked Mr. Neighborly’s tutorial best and I will use a similar structure. Read the rest of this entry »

This is the fourth part of my Road to Ruby enlightenment. It started a long time ago with tutorials and first steps. Read the rest of this entry »

Some time ago Martin Fowler wrote about Humane Interfaces which led to an lively debate. This is really old stuff, but yesterday I read about the upcoming Java 6 aka Mustang and one of the changes was adding the isEmpty() method to String.

So it seems like Java is slowly getting more humane

This is the third part of my Road to Ruby enlightenment. It started with tutorials and first steps. Read the rest of this entry »

This is the second leg on the Road to Ruby enlightenment. It started with tutorials and first steps. Read the rest of this entry »

This is not a Ruby tutorial. Read the rest of this entry »

I’m going on vacation and to keep me busy I’m looking for some advanced Ruby related articles. So far I found The adventures of scaling and the first few chapters of the Ruby Hacking Guide. After the number of comments I got for my last posts, I hope someone is reading this one, too. Do you have any pointers?

I like Ruby, I really do. But there is one thing I just don’t get. I seems to be good Ruby style to use as much implicit returns as possible. Why? Read the rest of this entry »

At my daytime job I had to rewrite a class which sends a Message to a Queue. Sounds simple? With EJB3 it is reasonably simple and can be done in around 10 lines of code involving lots of lookups. But if you are looking for a reliable solution which works even when the application server reboots every once in a while your code gets messy. My current solution has 120 lines of code and there are still some things to add like buffering of unsent messages. Read the rest of this entry »

Vincent Isambart started a project to translate the japanese ‘Ruby Hacking Guide’ into English. As I don’t speak Japanese (well, I learned it for 2 years in school, but that was a loooooooong time ago in a galaxy far, far away) and have little experience in C, I would be no help. But I think this is a worthwhile project and hope he will find enough people to help him finish it.