Introduction to Ruby on Rails – Slides and Links

As you can see, there are the slides. This post will also contain all the links we talk about tonight, so check back tomorrow!

Here are the links from the slides and the gems I talk about:

• Example Sites:
  • uPlaya – My day job. Handles tens of thousands of requests a day on two tiny Amazon EC2 instances. Could probably do it all on one, but we like redundancy
  • Ficly – Art project done with Jason Garber. Handles tens of thousands of requests a day on a single server hosted over at Seimitsu. Even with memcached, MySQL, Apache + Passenger all on the same box, we’re using less than three gb of RAM out of eight.
• Books and Help:
  • Agile Web Development with Rails, Third Edition – The best book to learn Rails with, period
  • rdoc.info – A lot of gem documentation all in one place.
  • Rails API Documentation – All the Rails classes and methods in one place. Can be a little daunting when you’re starting out, so start with the Agile Web book first.
• Scale Helpers:
  • Phusion Passenger
  • Ruby Enterprise Edition
  • memcached
• Ruby-based Alternatives:
  • Camping
  • Sinatra
  • webby
  • Halcyon
• Gems!
  • First, add github’s gem repository: gem sources -a http://gems.github.com
  • Pagination: mislav-will_paginate
  • Faster URLs: pauldix-typhoeus
  • Twitterness: hayesdavis-grackle
  • Faster XML or HTML parsing: nokogiri or hpricot
• Rails Plugins FTW!
  • cache-money: a write-through cache for ActiveRecord.
  • attachment_fu: great for handling uploads and storing them on s3
  • smurf: automatic minification of javascript and css
  • openid_enabled: just what it says, painless OpenId.