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Review: Great Bash (Video) [updated]

Sat, 09 Apr 2011 10:22:04 GMT

Bash is an essential tool that is often overlooked since it is most often the vehicle for running other code. I received a free copy of the video "Great Bash" as a part of the O'Reilly blogger review program and here is my take on it.

This was an easy to follow, yet comprehensive BASH scripting tutorial with a wealth of information not easily found in other tutorials I've looked at. Couple that with the screencast format and you have a winner. My initial review of this product was that it was incomplete and overpriced. It turns out that I only had a quarter of the material since it was still being produced. Now that I have all of the material I can safely say that it is well worth the price. I would definitely recommend this product to anyone looking for an easy way to beef up their BASH skills. There were a couple of screencast blunders where the title of a segment said something about "Great Javascript" instead of "Great Bash" but the content itself was intact and on target.

You can find more information about the video here.

Review: 97 Things Every Programmer Should Know

Tue, 22 Feb 2011 22:36:48 GMT

Imagine you asked 97 people who have had some experience in the software industry what they think every programmer should know. That is precisely what you get with this crowd sourced collection of tips from O'Reilly. I received a free copy of the e-book as a part of the O'Reilly blogger review program and here is my take on it.

I am always looking for ways to become a better programmer so the title of this book really drew me in. Honestly I was very disappointed when I realized that this book is nothing more than a collection of random thoughts from 97 random people. Okay, I've heard of a few of them, and there aren't 97 different contributors because some did multiple chapters, but based on the title, I expected to be taught essential tips from a master programmer. The chapters are obviously each written by the individual contributors because the writing style changes, sometimes drastically, between chapters.

While I moved from chapter to chapter, searching for any bits of wisdom in these pages, I felt like I was listening to the guy in the next cubicle talk about his opinions on unit testing or functional programming or his favorite IDE. At times it felt like some of the chapters even contradicted others and I found myself wondering what I was gaining by reading this book.

I've decided that the biggest problem with this book is the title. Imagine you had the opportunity, without leaving your desk, to chat with 97 would be co-workers about what they thought was important in the field of Software. Surely that would be an interesting experiment. You wouldn't expect every conversation to yield a golden egg, but out of 97 conversations, you're bound to pick up something useful. I don't agree that this book contains 97 things that every programmer should know. This book contains 97 answers to the question "what should every programmer know?". Once I viewed this book in that light, I was able to dismiss opinions that I didn't care for and embrace others that struck a chord with me. In the end, this was a useful experiment in my eyes and worth the time and effort to read the book.

You can find more information about the book here.

Review: Randal Schwartz on Learning Perl (Video)

Wed, 29 Dec 2010 15:28:03 GMT

Randal Schwartz, author of O'Reilly's Learning Perl (The Llama book), presents a 2 day video course covering the majority of the content from the book. This video presentation recreates a classroom setting that provides a unique and insightful introduction to the Perl language along with it's community and culture.

The course material was current and easy to follow. While the material was very good, I found that what I most enjoyed were the occasional side stories from this core member of the Perl community. These insights gave me a better feel for the current state of the Perl community and culture than I have been able to glean from web pages or technical books.

The only drawback to this video format for me was that in the presentation, the slides are not always visible on the screen when the speaker is referring to them. On more than one occasion I found myself rewinding the video trying to get back to the slide containing source code that was being dissected in order to understand what was being said. This wouldn't have been so much of a problem if the link to the Example Source Code had any content. It would have been very helpful to have a copy of the slides or corresponding source code while watching the video.

Overall this is a worthwhile introduction to Perl that provides an excellent starting point for beginners who prefer classroom style instruction to just reading a text book.

You can find more information about the Learning Perl Video here.

Another go with Rails 3 on Windows

Wed, 25 Aug 2010 23:30:10 GMT

It has been awhile since we last looked at Rails 3 on Windows and a lot has changed.

Start by downloading and installing Ruby 1.9.2p0 from here.

Once installed, open a command prompt and install rails:

gem install rails --no-ri --no-rdoc

Create a new rails app:

rails new TestRails3

Now make sure the dependencies are met:

cd TestRails3
bundle install

(at this point, more work may need to be done to get sqlite working. You can download the dll from here. Copy the dll into the System Path. I use C:\Tools and add that directory to the path. The Ruby bin directory works too.)

Now create some scaffolding:

rails g scaffold post title:string body:text
rake db:migrate

And start the server:

rails server

Navigate to http://localhost:3000/posts and see that everything is working.
You are now riding Rails 3 on Windows!

Ruby is too tightly coupled

Wed, 25 Aug 2010 22:59:05 GMT

I Love Ruby. Unfortunately "require 'ruby'" brings in unrelated cruft that I don't love. That has led me to the opinion that Ruby is too tightly coupled. I am not a VM implementor, I haven't even looked at the source code of Ruby itself, so how, you might ask, have I come to this conclusion?

Here are a few modules that are automatically included when I require 'ruby'

module Rockstar
Primadonnas had a negative connotation in the coding world but somewhere along the way it became a good thing to be completely self centered, egotistical, crass, and crude, without regard for anyone but numero uno. These are Rockstars and companies even seek after them now. Two talks into Mountain West Ruby Conference awhile back, I had heard the F-Bomb more frequently than the word "Ruby" and endured several minutes of crude junior high locker room humor referring to the sexual connotations of Python. Fortunately most of the speakers were far more respectful to the audience but unfortunately I got sick and ended up leaving the conference after day one (food poisoning I think.) At home I tried to listen to the justin.tv stream towards the end of the second day. My 4 year old daughter wanted to sit on my lap and watch with me. I didn't have it on for more than 15 minutes before another F-Bomb was dropped so I decided I would wait for the videos to be posted later when I could watch without worrying about my little girl's ears. Don't get me wrong, I don't expect a Ruby Conference to be an appropriate place for a 4 year old little girl to hang out but that experience was really just the icing on the cake for me. Ruby means developer happiness and awesome community so why the disrespectful and crude language. I don't care how you talk to your buddies or even your mom (okay, I would be disappointed if you talked to your mom like that too), but in a public forum, have some respect for common decency.

The irony of all this is that Matz himself was in attendance at MWRC. When I hear Matz speak I don't see Rockstar, I see a Jedi Master who recognizes that it is the force that is strong and that he is just using it. Matz is humble. Matz is nice. He should be the face of Ruby, but we are stuck with Rockstars and outspoken 'R-rated' personalities because they did some cool stuff using this awesome programming language that Matz created.
end #module Rockstar

module Mac
I don't own a Mac and I shouldn't need to own a Mac to program Ruby. Be forewarned if asking for support for a Windows issue in most forums, especially for gems. "M$ Sucks! buy an F-ing Mac!" Whatever happened to open, cross platform development? (I know, Windows isn't open, but neither is Mac) Not to mention whatever happened to Matz Is Nice And So We Are Nice? I personally prefer Ubuntu and only use Windows at work when that is what the client is using. I dislike working on Windows but Ruby can make it better. Fortunately there are some great people like Luis Lavena (http://rubyinstaller.org) making great progress to give Ruby a better supported platform in Windows. I use the tools necessary to get the job done and thanks to Luis and others, I have been able to use Ruby to do that, even when I'm stranded in Windows land.
end #module Mac

module Rails
I personally think modules Rockstar and Mac are largely dependencies of Rails and not Ruby itself but Rails is the most tightly coupled module with Ruby. It's hard to separate Ruby from Rails. I like Rails. I've written some Rails guides on this very blog. At MWRC which is a Ruby conference, most of the attendees (probably 85% judging from the hands raised) are working with Rails. There was even a talk about HTTP which has nothing to do with Ruby. I still found that talk interesting, but HTTP is not Ruby. Rails is not Ruby. I don't fault the conference organizers or the speakers. It is what it is. Most people using Ruby are using Rails. I may be in the minority when I say I think Ruby and Rails need to be decoupled but at least I'm in good company. Matz spoke at MWRC and he said he wants to get Ruby off the web. I completely agree. Ruby is awesome, Rails is awesome too, but Ruby is not Rails.
end #module Rails

Refactor...
Let's work on a decoupled Ruby that doesn't have dependencies on these modules. They will still be available because some people like them, but they should not be required. Here are some alternatives:
module MINASWAN
  #Matz Is Nice And So We Are Nice
end

module Jedi
  #You have much to learn my young Padowan
end

module NextBigApp
  #The one you wrote that is not Rails and helps people see how powerful Ruby really is
end

Ruby will be better for it and so will the community.

Massaging Rails 3 Beta on Windows

Fri, 05 Feb 2010 22:26:45 GMT

Ingredients: WinXP Pro, Ruby 1.9.1v243 (http://rubyinstaller.org)
(Note: If you've installed an earlier version of bundler you'll need to 'gem uninstall bundler' first)

Installing:

Following the official instructions first we take care of some prerequisites:

gem install tzinfo builder memcache-client rack rack-test rack-mount erubis mail text-format thor bundler i18n

I started from scratch so I needed rake as well:

gem install rake

Now the big kahuna:

gem install rails --pre

At this point you have the official Rails 3 beta installed. You'll want to check out all the posts going around documenting new changes in Rails 3, but for starters lets just start it up.

Let'er rip

Create a new rails app:

rails rails3_beta
...
cd rails3_beta

We need to let bundler take care of a few more dependencies now (note the new syntax, I dig it):

bundle install

Now we have what we need to run the server.
According to the new documentation, ruby script\server and other script commands are now called directly with rails from the root of the rails app. So 'rails server' should start up our webrick server on port 3000. Remember this is beta, so don't be discouraged when this doesn't work on Windows.

rails server #this doesn't work on Windows right now

c:/ruby19/lib/ruby/gems/1.9.1/gems/railties-3.0.0.beta/bin/rails:2: command not found: C:/rails3_beta/script/rails
...
in 'exec': No such file or directory - C:/rails3_beta/script/rails (Errno::ENOENT)

-Hiccup-

(excuse me)
The problem is, 'rails server' attempts to execute the file 'script\rails' directly. Windows doesn't know what to do with this file because it has no extension. (Windows doesn't understand she-bang lines like #!/usr/bin/env ruby.) RubyInstaller has an option to associate .rb file extensions to the Ruby interpreter, allowing the execution of .rb files directly but that doesn't help us here because the file has no extension.
There are a few ways to deal with this:

We could hack the railties bin\rails file to call this file with ruby.exe.
We could hack the railties bin\rails file to call rails.rb and rename script\rails to script\rails.rb. As long as we checked the box to associate .rb files with the Ruby interpreter while installing, this will work the way it was originally intended to.
In the short term, we can just substitute 'rails server' with 'ruby script\rails server', or 'rails generate scaffold test' with 'ruby script\rails generate scaffold test'.

So to run our new Rails3 app quick and dirty:

ruby script\rails server

you should now see the familiar webrick initialization and your server will be started on port 3000.

Go get'em Tiger!

Let's get in there and bang on it now, especially you folks on Windows. The benevolent forces that have given us Rails3 will need our feedback if we are going to have a viable Ruby ecosystem on Windows. If we don't tell them that we value a solid cross platform Rails experience, how will they know?

Update

For those who prefer a screencast, Simon Bohlin has recorded these steps and more which can be viewed here. His experience was that he need to run "gem update --system" before installing rails3. (Actually by doing this, the first two steps are no longer necessary because RubyGems 1.3.6 fixes the issue with dependency resolution on prerelease gems. I guess things have changed enough since this was posted to warrant a new article.) He also takes this article a step further and installs the sqlite3 gem which is the default db in rails. Thanks Simon.

From Zero to Rails3 on Windows in 600 seconds

Sat, 30 Jan 2010 22:34:04 GMT

[

Update:

Quite a lot has changed since this post was written. See Another Go with Rails 3 on Windows for a more up to date Rails 3 on Windows guide.

]

Some Prep Work

Download and install the following:

msysgit (Git for Windows) I'm using Git-1.6.5.1-preview20091022.exe
Ruby 1.9.1 I'm using rubyinstaller-1.9.1-p243-rc1.exe (Make sure to select the option to add Ruby\bin to your path)
Sqlite3 dll extract this into the bin directory of your newly created Ruby installation (c:\ruby\bin or c:\ruby19\bin)

That probably took about 300 seconds so we'd better get moving...

Showtime

Create a new directory for your rails app. Avoid spaces in the path. I'll be using c:\Rails3App Create a file called Gemfile in the root of your new directory with the following content:

gem "rails", git: "git://github.com/rails/rails.git"
git "git://github.com/rails/arel.git"
git "git://github.com/rails/rack.git"

require 'symlink' #hack to help bundler do it's thing on windows

#continue with other gems
gem 'rspec'
gem 'sqlite3-ruby'

Now create another file in the same directory called symlink.rb with the following:

require 'FileUtils'
# File.symlink hack (no symlink on windows)
class File
  def File.symlink(a,b)
    FileUtils.cp_r(a,b,:preserve => false)
  end
end

(Bundler depends on symlink which isn't implemented on Windows. This file provides a work around.)
Now open cmd.exe and cd to your new rails app directory:

cd c:\Rails3App

Install the new fangled bundler gem:

gem install bundler

Say the magic words:

gem bundle

Wait another 120 seconds and poof! You've installed Rails3. It's not installed like a normal gem though. Bundler put all of those gems directly inside this directory so to use rails type

bin\rails . -s

This uses the vendored rails gem to fill out the rest of the rails app in the current directory. Now when you view the contents of c:\Rails3App you will see a brand new rails3 application. You should be able to start up your new application like normal:

ruby script\server

The End

Give it a test run. This is still 3.0 pre alpha code so expect some hiccups but man, that was much easier than you thought it would be, right?

Heroku my Hero!

Sat, 02 Jan 2010 21:05:01 GMT

Thanks to Heroku for providing a great service. I am now hosting this blog on Heroku via Radiant CMS for free! New content coming soon…