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!

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

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!!!

“A word of advice to all ASP.Net developers who read this, don’t use Ruby on Rails. It will only make you realize how bad you’ve got it ”

Daniel’s Stuff » Blog Archive » ASP.Net blows chunks

I saw an interesting post by Daniel Parnell about how ASP.NET just wasn’t the same after trying Ruby on Rails for web application development. There is a fair amount of opinion about which is better and so far to me it seems that Ruby and Rails seems to have the upper hand as I’ve seen a number of developers make the switch from ASP.NET to Rails.

Personally I’ve never had any experience with ASP.NET and after reading many other developers comments about switching to rails, don’t really plan to either.

Also there is this talk by Dave Thomas at Railsconf 2006.

What’s your thoughts.

Blogged with Flock

Looking for an edge in Rails development? Want to fast track the Ruby on Rails learning curve? Well there is a way! Geoffrey Grosenbach from TopFunky.com has a website dedicated to providing high quality training video tutorials on everything Ruby on Rails at his site PeepCode.

There is one tutorial per month from mastering apps like Textmate and Capistrano to Test First Development and RJS Templates. Geoffrey is also well know for his Ruby on Rails podcast which you can get from iTunes. He also travels the world teaching all of us Nuby Rails developers on how to do things right so that makes him an authority on the subject.

I’m off to buy a couple of screencasts from Peepcode for the great price of only $9 each.

But what about when you are developing on Microsoft’s Windows platform. Well after playing around with a few editors I found Notepad++ which has some remarkable similarity’s to Textmate for Apple.

The best part about Notepad++ is it’s free and it’s also open source, however you can give donations as it started and developed by Don Ho and a small group of developers. I didn’t spend a lot of time using Notepad++ mainly because I spend most of my time on a Mac however I did enjoy using it as a Ruby on Rails editor for Windows. The only thing I didn’t see was a project window which you could import your Rails project framework into for easy access.

Notepad++ has full code highlighting, use defined language including Ruby, zoom in and out, and alot more.

A great editor and well worth further investigation.

After contemplating modifying my Mac to run Ruby on Rails I decided against any system modifications. The main reason is any documentation on the web regarding installing Rails on the Mac was a little too out dated for my liking and very little support.

So what was I to do? Well I decided that using Locomotive from http://locomotive.raaum.org/ was going to be the safest and easiest option and I wasn’t wrong. Installing Locomotive was super easy and all I needed to do was download it, mount the dmg file and drag the Locomotive Icon into my Applications folder and Bingo! Ruby on Rails is ready to go.

The only thing to keep in mind is that you need to make sure you use the open up any terminals from within the Locomotive interface which is again pretty easy to remember. Locomotive at the time of this post uses the lighttpd web server by default when starting the web server using the command ruby script/server. If you prefer you can use the Webrick webserver with Locomotive by forcing it ruby script/server webrick. Supposedly Webrick is better but I’m no expert so I’m just using Webrick for any development.

The only other thing to keep in mind with Locomotive is that if you want to do more robust database work you’ll need to have MySQL installed on the Mac as the databases shipped with Locomotive aren’t really for a production environment.