Ruby is a really dynamic language, and you can do a lot of cool things, one of them is a Struct (Structure) that allows you to make throw away objects that you can call methods on….

If you are using BE DE DE or TE DE DE, then you will get situations in your specs or tests where you want to be able to just create a valid model of another type to test against. This is where factories and builders come in handy.

If you use Rails, you sometimes get a situation where the custom error messages just don’t work, here is how you can fix it…

Ruby is marvelous, everything evaluates. Which means a lot of the time, you can get away with things like ‘if @user…” and just depend on the existence of the @user var. But what if you just really need a Boolean true or false? Here is a little pattern you can use to do this…

What is an <em> tag? How do you manually make a select box? What about a multi value select box? Do you know the difference between a <submit> tag and a <button> tag? Can you hand code a form to make a restful post to one of your Rails controllers? If you can’t do all the above with plain HTML and no rails helpers or don’t know the difference between a GET and POST request and when you use either, then you need to read on. If you can, feel free to skip to the next section.

If you are using Rails, you are most likely using migrations. Have you ever had a migration fail half way through? Have you ever then had to figure out how to find each change and revert it in the database? Would you like to never have to do that again? Here is how…

Learning Rails is hard enough without also facing the task of learning Ruby at the same time. Here I go over some of the must knows in Ruby so that you get some basic understanding of how to do Rails.

Being a Rails developer means that, yes, you too need to learn how to (gasp) program! No, seriously! Here are my tips on that subject.

Sometimes it is easy to forget that when you take the plunge to learn something as encompassing as ruby on Rails, you forget just how MUCH you need to learn, and it can all seem a bit overwhelming at first. Here is a good way to go about learning it.

So, in the last two tips, I have shown how to check the format of the email and save the actual address only in the database. But how to check that the email domain name is valid? Easy!

If you are using a Ruby on Rails app, or Nitro, or just a plain Ruby application that handles email, you will need to handle at some point, bounced messages. This a simple way to get to the guts of the email and find out what the error codes are…

Well, 1.2.2 is now released. You can get the latest version by gem install tmail or download from the TMail Rubyforge project

If you have ruby and a mac, no doubt you want to try out 1.9 – but be warned, some things can break! This little tutorial shows you how to install Ruby 1.9 in parallel to your 1.8.x installation… which can be handy…

Ruby on Rails makes wonderful use of the two cornerstone Ruby classes, Hash and Array. Here I give a short tutorial on how to use Hash and Array with Rails.

Being in Australia, I could not go to Ruby Conf 2007, but they have put the talks online, you can check it out at the Ruby Conf CodeFreaks website.