Building Up a Ruby Toolbox

In my time off, I’ve been getting up to speed on Ruby and Ruby on Rails. In the process, I’ve been trying to build up a decent toolbox of apps, libraries, and docs. Right now, this is all pretty standard stuff, and I’m hoping to keep adding to it.

Books

• Programming Ruby, a.k.a. the Pickaxe. This is kinda the de-facto text on the language itself.
• Rails for Java Developers. This is probably one of the best programming books I’ve read. It was a quick and easy read, and really hooked in well with my background. All scenarios are laid out as “here’s how you’d do it in a Java stack, and here’s how Rails does it.” Almost without fail, the Rails version is succinct and elegant. Also introduced me to the AppFuse project, which does for Java most of what Rails does – definitely a candidate for usage in my next Java project.

Applications

• TextMate. This is the editor you see in all the Ruby screencasts. It has a lot of IDE features with completion, launching, etc. I still feel like I’m only scratching the surface.
• CocoaMySQL. A lightweight, simple MySQL admin and query tool for Mac. Not feature-rich, but stable and free.

Libraries

These were recommended in the excellent Rails for Java Devs book above.

• acts_as_authenticated, a plugin for doing authentication, user sessions (with ‘remember me’ cookie), account creation, and management.
• authorization, a plugin for doing role-based access, with DB ACLs.