Three weeks ago I mentioned Gregg Pollack and Jason Seifer’s great page caching tutorial. In that short time, and mostly on the back of that article, they’ve gotten 1000 subscribers and thousands of page views. Their tutorials are good!
Not ones to rest on their laurels, they’ve now written and released the second part of their caching tutorial series, focusing on action and fragment caching. They don’t go into insane levels of detail, but cover action and fragment caching reasonably comprehensively and provide lots of illustrative code snippets. And for those developers using Edge Rails, they also take a quick look at ActiveRecord query caching. Read More

Railscasts is a new project by Ryan Bates providing regular, free screencasts on topics relating to Ruby on Rails. As opposed to Geoffrey Grosenbach’s wonderfully detailed Peepcode screencasts, Railscasts videos are very short and each is focused on a very small area. Current topics include layouts, with_scope, Symbol#to_proc, caching with instance variables, and dynamic find_by methods.

The screencasts are well produced and to the point, and feature the creepiest opening sequence of any Ruby-related screencast so far.

Note: Make sure to use the “Download” links on the Railscasts site rather than clicking on the video titles as that will result in an error. Read More

Benchmarking with httperf is a new screencast by Geoffrey Grosenbach in his Peepcode series of Ruby / Rails related videos. It costs $9, but for that you get a bundle of source code and a very high quality video of 53 minutes’ length.

In the video Geoffrey covers a lot of basic theory about statistics (including standard deviation) and shows how to extract useful statistics from Rails log files and httperf, a Web server performance monitoring tool. He demonstrates the actual effects of using the various types of caching available to Rails developers (including what types of caching are faster and by how much) and what effect sessions have on request levels. Read More