Getting ready to upgrade to Rails 3.1? Or, perhaps you're just curious about what the upgrade experience looks like? This collection of helpful resources will guide you through the upgrade to Rails 3.1.

And if you're just wanting to wrap your head around all that's new in Rails 3.1, we've got you covered there as well.

The Ruby Switcher is a super-lightweight tool for quickly switching between Ruby versions. You can easily experiment with Ruby 1.9 to try out a gem or two, and if you run into issues, you can safely retreat back to 1.8.x (after you report the Ruby 1.9 problems to the gem's maintainers, of course). The latest version includes single-line commands that install the various Ruby versions for you. Wanna try out Ruby 1.9.1? Just type install_ruby_191, and the Ruby Switcher handles the rest. The Ruby Switcher gives you shell-specific Ruby versions: while one terminal window is testing out a gem or app in Ruby 1.9, you can have another terminal performing the same tests with Ruby 1.8.7 (or JRuby, or Ruby 1.8.6, or REE, or Leopard Ruby, etc.). When switching between Ruby versions is this seamless, there’s no reason not to experiment.

relevance-rcov squashes numerous bugs (including those gnarly segfaults) in the old version of rcov. Try it on your Ruby 1.8.x projects today, and if you run into any problems, fire up the report-cov-bug tool and let us know.

Git has seen a huge influx of newcomers over the past year, especially in the Ruby community. Many folks installed Git as they read through their first tutorial, got it working, and are still using that same trusty installation today. But rest assured, Git has not been standing still.

If you installed Git a year ago (perhaps when Rails made the move in April of last year), you would’ve grabbed v1.5.5. The Git team has cranked out five feature releases since then, full of usability improvements and a few new tricks ... none of which were covered in that year-old tutorial that got you started with Git.

If you’re not yet sportin’ the v1.6.3 hotness, here are ten reasons to Git up!

Historically, when selecting a JavaScript testing solution, you were forced to choose whether you wanted a framework that could run your tests in the browser or one that could only run your tests in a headless fashion. By providing a Rails-friendly, convention-over-configuration wrapper around a collection of great open source tools, Blue Ridge gives us the best of both worlds: fast, automation-friendly, and headless testing plus the ability to run your tests in whichever browser is acting up on any given day.

Muness Alrubaie & Chad Humphries explain how to quickly switch between Ruby 1.8.6 and Ruby 1.9.1 with just a few keystrokes. And the change is local to the current shell. Nice!

The latest release of RunCodeRun - a hosted Continuous Integration service for Ruby and Rails - now supports public browsing of the open source projects that have been building there. Check out the build status and build histories for projects like RSpec, Shoulda, Tarantula, and others.

Larry Karnowski gives the low-down on the consequences of not passing a block when using alias_method_chain and provides a recommended template that will help your alias_method_chain calls behave like good citizens in the Rails ecosystem.

Rails 2.1 has been out for a little over a month now, and if you haven't yet had a chance to get up to speed on its new moves, spend an hour today with any one of these five resources and you'll be ready to rock in no time. Now get crackin’. There will be a quiz.