News
I try to keep up with Ruby and Ruby on Rails, even if I’m not working with one of them at the moment. These are the three feeds helping me to get the latest news:
Planet Ruby on Rails
PlanetRubyOnRails.com, not to be mixed up with PlanetRubyOnRails.org, is a simple feed aggregator with a set of quite informative blogs. Including the official Riding Rails Blog, Ruby Inside, and InfoQ. Unfortunately it doesn’t provide an RSS-Feed anymore, but thanks to Feed43 it’s easy to build one on your own.
Rails Envy
Every Wednesday Gregg Pollack and Jason Seifer of Rails Envy publish their Rails Envy Podcast, covering last week’s most important topics in the Ruby and Rails community. They’re giving a short summary for every topic, together with a link in their shownotes and usually are fooling around. The podcast’s length is usually between 10 to 15 minutes.
RubyOnRails-Ug Planet
Just like PlanetRubyOnRails, the planet of the german ruby on rails usergroup is a feed aggregator, except it includes blogs of members of the german Ruby on Rails community. (Yes, mine too …) Its far from being as active as the international one, but usually includes interesting posts.
Documentation
When I’m working on Ruby and Ruby on Rails code, I use there resources to quickly look up documentation:
RubyDoc
Ruby-Doc.org provides the documentation for both Ruby’s Core and Stdlib. The documentation is in the default RDoc format, so I usually end up hitting [Strg]+[F] and using my browsers search function to quickly get to the relevant sections.
Rails API Documentation
What Ruby-Doc.org is for ruby, api.rubyonrails.com is for rails. It’s the standard rails documentation in the default RDoc format. As with Ruby-Doc.org I use my browsers search to quickly find what I’m looking for.
Rails Doc
Rails-Doc.org is a quite new site providing the full rails documentation. Unlike the default API documentation site (see above) it also includes documentation of older rails versions. Additionally it has a nice search engine, and adds the ability to post notes. There are other sites providing similar functionality for the rails documentation, but somehow Rails-Doc.org just feels right and I’m using more and more.
Gem Server
Did you know the fabulous RubyGem-Tools
provide a server including the documentation for all your installed
gems? Simple run gem server on the console, fire up your
browser and navigate to http://localhost:8808.
Okay, it’s just the standard RDoc documentation for each gem, without
any fancy search or anything … but who cares if you’re somewhere in the
middle of nowhere with no internet connection? :-)
Other
RailsCasts
Last but definitely not least, are the RailsCasts by Ryan Bates. Every Monday he publishes a approx. 5 to 10 minute screencast on a variety of topics related to rails development. If you haven’t seen one of them yet, don’t hesitate any longer. Ryan’s explanations are concise and based on practical examples.
What are your resources on Ruby / Rails? Which blogs are you reading to stay up-to-date? Which documentation are you using? I’m interested in your comments (there are way to few anyways … ;-))!
Update (Aug 15.)
Nodeta, creators of Rails-Doc.org, released APIdock yesterday. APIdock extends the Rails-Doc.org concept to multiple projects. Currently Rails, Ruby and RSpec are included.