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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.

For most people, ISBNs are random noise on the backs of books, helpful mostly for barcode scanning at the register. For publishing folk, ISBNs can actually be memorable, magic keys for jumping from one system to the next. Of course, there are now two different flavors of ISBN, the obsolete (I prefer 'classic') variety with 10 digits, and the new version with 13 digits. Working with two sets of magic keys can be complicating.

Distributed version control systems have brought up some pretty important questions. A DVCS adds a good deal of complexity to an already complicated system. Source control is rather sticky business as it not only deals with complex content, but the...

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.

Learn to create a custom SOAP request using Ruby and Net::HTTP

Henry Liu and Justin Edelson authors of the just released JRuby Cookbook talk about JRuby, the current state of the Java platform, and some of the compelling benefits of integrating a language like Ruby with the Java platform.

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.

Learn how to swap custom views using RubyCocoa in your interface.

We haven't quite found the sweet spot for deploying apps to the cloud; the dependence on traditional databases and relatively complex environments make something like dropping a Pylons app on some random service pretty troublesome.

Screencast showing how to create a RubyCocoa application which pulls search results from Amazon using their Web API and populates a table.

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.

John Lam, who heads the Iron Ruby effort at Microsoft, stopped by to tell O'Reilly News all the exciting work going on with dynamic languages at Redmond. John spent some time discussing what makes a language dynamic, what the benefits of dynamic languages are, and how Microsoft is trying to leverage the power of lanaguages such as Ruby inside their CLR framework.