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I’m working on another Cassandra demo, but didn’t have time to finish, so I decided to show you Ruby Koans. It’s a very interesting test-driven approach to learning Ruby. I hope you enjoy it.

You can get cassandra at cassandra.apache.org and the ruby gem by running: gem install cassandra I did run into a problem with the trift_client gem when installing. If you get a Load Error, run this. sudo chmod 644 /usr/local/lib/ruby/gems/1.8/gems/thrift_client-0.6.3/lib/thrift_client/*.rb sudo chmod 755 /usr/local/lib/ruby/gems/1.8/gems/thrift_client-0.6.3/lib/thrift_client/connection Here are some of the Cassandra commands from the video: #connects to [...]

With the recent release of the Google Plus beta (ask me for an invite if you want one), I felt it appropriate to show a simple way to create a Like or +1 button for your Rails application. The app and concept is pretty simple, so I won’t worry about posting the code below. Install: [...]

Specification Clicking a star rating turns on the stars to the left of the star I clicked. Clicking a star submits the star rating. When I refresh the page, the star ratings should be persistent. We’ll be using Rails’ functions including: form_for hidden_field Rails Helpers We’ll be using jQuery functions including: click each ajax <code> [...]

Polymorphic associations are very simple, as are many-to-many associations. When you blend the two, it’s not nearly as simple. Since there isn’t a working build-in mechanism for many-to-many polymorphic associations. Here’s a quick demo of what happens if you try to set up a traditional has_many :through association with a polymorphic association. I also show [...]

I had several requests in UserVoice to provide a Many to Many tutorial in Rails. This is a demonstration of how to put together a “has and belongs to many” association and a “has many through” association. This is somewhat basic to Ruby on Rails, but important if you need to associate different models. Download [...]

  Ruby on Rails 3.1 is moving to use Sprockets to compile CoffeeScript into JavaScript and include JQuery in it’s JavaScript by default. This is a quick demo of how it all hangs together to manage your JavaScript in Rails 3.1.

  CoffeeScript is now going to be a default installation with Ruby on Rails. So, I installed CoffeeScript and NodeJS and have been playing with it for the last hour or so. Here are the basics you need to know to use CoffeeScript including functions, arrays, hashes (objects), control functions (if, else, unless) and loops. [...]

In preparing to show off SASS, I found the Compass system, which uses SASS and organizes your stylesheets in a unique way. In this tutorial, I walk you though installing compass, installing the 960 grid system, and organizing your SASS stylesheets in an intelligent way. One note, I couldn’t remember the URL for the 960 [...]

In this installment in the Delicious Clone, we use CanCan to set some permissions on the Bookmarks Controller. Next week, we’ll finish the bookmark creation process and the following, we’ll add styling with SASS.