Wow, I have to say that this is a pretty cool deal. Sitepoint is giving away for the next 60 days a FREE, that’s right absolutely free copy of Patrick Lenz Ruby on Rails Web Applications book.

Patrick has been in the web development business for year and is the CEO of development firm limited-overhead.

So is there a catch with the book being free?  Well no but you will have to complete a form to add your email address so you can be sent a link for the book.  If you don’t like being subscribed, you can always easily unsubscribe later.

Well worth the download.  Go get em cause time is ticking!

After having to Google (actually I used Yahoo on this occasion) I thought I might post a link up to a blog post that has the information I need rather than replicating it on my own blog.

check out the 2.0 deprecated tags and the new way of coding it

As part of a new rails site I’m working on, I found that I needed to install Rmagic to provide image manipulation in my app. So what I found was that it was going to as easy as installing the rmagick gem.

So I fired up my terminal and typed

sudo gem install rmagick

Whoops!!! Error time!

Bulk updating Gem source index for: http://gems.rubyforge.org
Building native extensions. This could take a while...
configure: error: Can't install RMagick. Can't find Magick-config or GraphicsMagick-config program.

ERROR: While executing gem … (RuntimeError)
ERROR: Failed to build gem native extension.
Gem files will remain installed in /usr/local/lib/ruby/gems/1.8/gems/rmagick-1.15.7 for inspection.

So off I went to find a solution to this problem and kill a couple of hours of free time.

I found an post by Paul Hepworth on installing Rmagick on OSX but I didn’t have macports installed so off I went again to find an alternative solution.

Rmagick at ruby-forge happened to have installation instructions but I had another problem. I also needed to have X11 installed which I didn’t so I had to digg up my OSX installation disk and follow some instructions on installing X11 on mac on this post by trae mccombs.

Back to the rmagick instructions on ruby-forge you’ll find a ruby script that you can run now that you have X11 installed and it’ll do the whole install for you. Then all that’s left to do is

sudo gem install rmagick

Code on!!!