This is the third part of my Road to Ruby enlightenment. It started with tutorials and first steps.

RedHanded

RedHanded is Why’s (from Why’s (Poignant) Guide to Ruby) blog. I don’t really know why I didn’t check out his blog earlier when I read WPGtR but I didn’t.

But I think this was a good thing, because I already knew a little bit about Ruby when I stumbled over his blog. This made reading his dazzling display of ruby magic more fun, like watching a stage magician with a slight chance of understanding and appreciating his tricks.

Go and check out bits and inspect. My all time favorint post is Camping Microframework, the code is cryptic and I cannot say I understand it but the whole post is hilarious (here is the real docu for Camping, a <4kb webframework).

Shades of Gray

In another post on this blog I asked for advanced articles on ruby and Pat pointed me to Shades of Gray. I already knew the author James Edward Gray II as the organizer of the Ruby Quiz. Shades of Gray contains exactly the kind of articles I was looking for all the time. The only sad thing is that it contains only a handful of these articles. His Higher Order Ruby posts provide Ruby translations of the example code from the book Higher Order Perl, his Ruby tutorials are among the best I’ve ever read and his other posts are worth reading, too.

If you read only a single sentence about good ruby style, it should be this one from Code as a Data Type:

In my experience, you know you’re doing Ruby right when you are dropping code and gaining functionality

This is true for almost any language, but in Ruby it is especially elegant to do. I guess this is the reason why I like programming in Ruby, it gives you the ability to write very compact but still readable code.

I’m getting pretty close to the present, but I hope I will find enough content for another post in this series so check again later…

BTW, if you have recommendations with other sites/articles/books on good ruby style, please let me know.