Ruby Best Practices: The Best New Ruby Blog (This Year)
It's pretty rare I recommend new blogs to follow on Ruby Inside. Not because I don't like them - I link to their posts all the time! - but because it's hard to tell if a new blog is going to keep going and be worth your while.
Well, the Ruby community has a new blog in its midst that's proving to be a must-read - Ruby Best Practices. It's a must-subscribe (RSS feed) for Rubyists who want to get a good overview of what a collection of Ruby gurus believe and think about Ruby and how she should be written.
Like Ruby Inside, the Ruby Best Practices blog was launched (back in April) as a side project relating to a forthcoming book - Gregory Brown's Ruby Best Practices (pre-order it from Amazon here) in this case. The book attempts to give readers an insight into how to "use Ruby the way Rubyists do" for developing beautiful APIs and DSLs, using functional programming ideas, and adopting useful Ruby idioms and styles.
Gregory wanted the accompanying blog to be a group blog and back in March he put out a call for people to apply. It launched in April with James Britt, Kirk Haines, Robert Klemme, Jeremy McAnally, Sean O’Halpin, Magnus Holm and Lakshan Perera on-board and most of the posts ever since have been pretty interesting. I'd particularly recommend Gregory's Reading Ruby's Standard Library for Fun and Profit, Robert Klemme's Control flow features and readability, and James Britt's Solve the problem, not just a problem for starters.
The only downside, and the reason this endorsement still feels like a gamble to me, is that of the eight writers, only 3 have posted at all, and for the last ten posts it's just been Gregory Brown and Robert Klemme back and forth. But.. I reckon if they can get some more subscribers, buzz, and if people can see the promise in a multi-user blog like this in the Ruby community, I suspect those other writers will either come out of the woodwork with some killer articles, or enough people will be begging Gregory for a slot or to accept guest posts that we won't have to worry too much.
So.. go subscribe and, hopefully, let's see the best new Ruby blog turn into the best Ruby practices blog, well, ever.
June 4, 2009 at 7:52 pm
Is there a twitter account that I can follow to get notifications on new posts? I really don't use RSS that much now...
Thanks!
June 4, 2009 at 9:11 pm
Whoa, massive thanks for this post!!!
Yeah, it's a little hard to get folks to publish articles, but it's also partly because we got up and running about a month faster than any of us anticipated.
The cool thing is that the underlying tech of the blog makes it very easy to add new authors, even for a one-off post. Feeds would automatically be generated, profiles built, etc. This means we can accept contributions from github pull requests in the future.
Our core group will hopefully all participate in content creation, but failing that, they can referee third party contributions when we open that up. Our policy is that if you can convince one of us that your post is topical and exciting, it'll get pulled in. More on all that soon.
Thank you so much for the massive plug, and we'll do what we can to not let folks down who take your advice.
June 4, 2009 at 10:35 pm
@Andrew. All posts are announced at http://twitter.com/rubypractices, but you will also get some book spam there, as well as occasional updates of where I am. Though that account is not a personal one, so its not *too* noisy.
June 5, 2009 at 12:01 am
I've *two* posts now in assorted states of not-yet-but-almost-readiness.
Part of the problem (such that it is) is that we're aiming for a particular level of quality, and trying to stay on topic.
I hope to have something out in a few days, and I expect that is true of some the other authors as well.
June 12, 2009 at 5:05 pm
Thanks for the post.
I'm a big fan of PBP (Perl Best Practices; since I'm coming from Perl ;)
I have been looking for the equivalent for Ruby.
Many of the PBP suggestions can be applied in a general context but many are also Perl specific.