One of the greatest difficulties of learning a new programming language or framework is that you don’t know if you’re doing things the right way. Tutorials and books can only take you so far, then you’re alone; it’s not as easy as it was in school where other people were willing to guide you through the more difficult concepts.

You think “I know there are areas where I could improve, where I could do things in a smarter way, but how?”  Ruby on Rails guides you towards doing the right things with its simplicity and convention over configuration mantra, but what about Ruby, just plain Ruby?

Ruby isn’t perfect, it’s not the easiest language to learn after almost a decade of C/C++ and its cousins Java and C#.  My first Ruby book quickly became obsolete; its code examples illustrate approaches that are out of date, deprecated or just plain wrong.  Suffice to say the pace of Ruby’s development isn’t going to slow down anytime soon.  So what do you do?

Frustrated, I thought to myself “Wouldn’t it be great to see how other people write and use Ruby code? To learn from their technique” Then it hit me like a brick, Unit Testing!  Almost every gem comes with its own unit testing folder.

I must have browsed through every Ruby Gem I have and read the unit tests, not only did I learn new Ruby techniques, I learned more about Unit Testing.  Now, the first thing I do after I download and install a gem is browse over to “C:rubylibrubygems1.8gemsgemnametest” and read the unit tests, there’s no better way to learn Ruby.

I still miss intellisense.

Interested in high traffic RoR web sites?  Read how Robot Co-op’s setup handles 2.5 million hits per day and GreatSchools’ setup handles ~1 Million page views per day.

Eclipse is my best friend right now, I think I’ve said that before, if I change my mind, don’t be surprised, I’m always looking for ways to make software development easier. I like having all my tools in one place, it makes me more productive; for my RoR adventures I’ve been using Eclipse with the Ruby Development Tools, RadRails and Subclipse plug-in.

Eclipse/RDT gives me easy access to my all my unit tests and a nice graphical interface, source control, I never have to leave the IDE and RadRails is the BEST IDE for RoR development, nothing comes close. I wish Eclipse was more responsive, you can never have enough RAM for Eclipse, but I can’t complain too much. It’s been a much better experience than Jedit and FreeRIDE, although, I still pop open Notepad++ and a console window and hack out some Ruby code every couple of days

This sounds like a giant Ruby commercial, but there’s more to it than the hype. Software development has come a long way for me from the ‘old’ days (~2002) when I programmed in C++ with KDevelop, when my tools were always getting in my way. KDevelop wasn’t very user friendly, neither is C++ or make, now I don’t spend as much time wrangling with my tools. Things just feel easier.

I still miss Intellisense.