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Twenty years of change are shifting technology from top-down broadcast-model documentation and training to a more conversational approach that shrinks the social distance between teacher and learner, personalizing our experience.

Rails? Microsoft Access? Aren't those from different planets? Well, they may have different origins, but their similarities give me hope.

I bought the program Coda by Panic software. It is a pretty cool app, even though it is not my preferred editor. One thing that I love about Panic software is they make beautiful interfaces. In this tutorial, I'm going to show you how to create a 'sheet' similar to those found in Coda.

Recently I ran into a problem where I needed to be able to send emails via two different SMTP accounts within the same Rails application. Here's a way to get around this fairly easily using YAML.

I have upgraded several Rails 1.2.x programs to 2.x. This can be quite a leap, and some of the steps are counterintuitive, so this post attempts to put everything together, like a recipe. I'd also like to hear more stories about upgrading platforms; such stories may indeed emend my suggested hacks and tweaks. Yet the point of unit tests, and TDD, is to make the smallest changes possible, and relentlessly test each change. Upgrading a major version tick is a big change, so you must force the upgrade to work incrementally, as a series of small changes.

Rails updates versions frequently. There are a few different ways to make sure your application is running the version of Rails you think it should be, and to make sure you can run it under the version it expects.

I've had a lot of positive feedback from readers for including Heroku in Learning Rails. Its web-based interface is the easiest way I know to get started with Rails programming without getting trapped in installation challenges. They're changing gears a...

My New Year's Resolution for this year is simple: practice. You don't have to achieve (or even aim for) total mastery for the practice to be worthwhile.

Instant Rails is getting old, but it's still a quick way to install Rails and start coding. This screencast shows how to download and install Instant Rails, and shows off how it works with a simple example from Chapter 2 of Learning Rails.

Rails application templates, just added in Edge Rails, offer Rails developers the chance to spread their wings and bring Rails to new audiences and new capabilities - and might even help Rails lead the next generation of frameworks.

If you want to explore Rails, heroku.com offers an easy way to get started, using a web-based interface that neatly hides the complexity of installation and database management.

Once you have Rails installed, it's time to explore the foundations of how Rails applications are put together. It's not quite programming yet - it's more looking around to figure out how the pieces fit together.

Want to install a Rails development environment on a bare-bones Ubuntu server setup? It's not that hard.

There are way too many operating systems and choices within those operating systems to provide a straightforward explanation of installing Rails. To solve that, I'm creating screencasts that show how to install Rails, demonstrating both how to do it and that it actually is possible.

Jason Fried discusses the day to day operations of 37signals and some of his ideas for minimizing distraction in the workplace. Fried talks about his view that startups should focus on profit and product before accepting venture capital. In this video, Fried's focus on the fundamentals of product design suggest an austerity and simplicity uncommon in an industry suffering from a pandemic of hype.

Test Driven Development works best when each test case targets one aspect of a class's interface. So this post will demonstrate a simple and direct way to test a partial without testing the Views, layouts, and Controller actions surrounding it. On very complex projects, this technique keeps your partials decoupled.

Chad Fowler and Rich Kilmer discuss where Ruby and Rails have gone in the past year, whether RESTful composition obviates the need for ORM, what's interesting in the upcoming world of Ruby and Rails, and how Maglev, Rubinius, and other new Ruby implementations contribute to the world of dynamic languages.