I just released a major update to Everyday Rails Testing with RSpec, my intro book on testing heretofore untested Rails applications. Of note, the update now covers the Capybara 2.0 DSL and RSpec's preferred expect() syntax. I also rewrote the chapters on model specs and factories.

The update is free to anyone who's already purchased the book, or you can buy a copy starting at $9 on Leanpub's sliding scale (suggested price is $15).

A series of posts I did recently on Everyday Rails about how I learned to test Rails applications (using RSpec) gained a bit of traction, so I decided to make an extended ebook version. You can read about the details on Everyday Rails and then head over to the book's page on Leanpub to pick up the advanced access version for $9 US. Thanks!

I posted some advice on legacy migrations, based on Zach Holman's article on the same topic a couple of years ago and my own recent experience migrating a few datasets to new applications. I'd appreciate any feedback or additions you might have. Thanks!

Hi, Aaron from Everyday Rails here. At my day job I'm one of a tiny group of Ruby developers at the University of Kansas, and I'm hoping to find other developers working in education. I've created EduRuby, a Google Group for Rubyists working in the educational field (developers, academics, system administrators, instructors ...). If you fall under that umbrella I hope you'll join--I'm interested in exploring how we use Ruby to support learning and building connections between Ruby-minded educators. Thanks for your time--

Since the topic of how to learn Ruby and Rails has been a hot one of late, and I'd been thinking about it myself for awhile, I thought I'd throw my two cents on getting started with Ruby (and Rails) into the mix. Comments and suggestions are much appreciated; I'm using this to help future new employees get up to speed.

I just posted a walkthrough of the steps I took to set up RVM an Passenger for development in Rails 3 and Rails 2.3, using project-specific gemsets. These are the steps that worked for me; if you have suggestions I'd like to hear those as well.

I've written a quick intro tutorial on using Chronic and Chronic Duration to parse user-entered date/time strings ("tomorrow," "8/12/10," "next tuesday") and duration strings ("3 minutes 45 seconds," "2 hours"). I like using these in conjunction with fancy datepickers in my applications. Hope you find it useful.

On Everyday Rails, my blog targeted toward beginner-to-intermediate Rails developers, I'm trying to collect a list of free books on Ruby on Rails that people can either download or read online. I've got the obvious ones but if you know of others I'd appreciate it if you could add them in the comments. Thanks!

I've added a tutorial on Everyday Rails to show how to move Paperclip uploads out of the public directory and limit who may download them. It's based on how I've done this in a few applications at work for groups who need to keep files private--hope you find it useful.

After discussing the merits of RVM for trying out Rails 3 without disrupting one's development environment with some local Rubyists, I wrote this quick walkthrough of installing RVM and a Rails 3 gemset targeted toward people who haven't used RVM.