Slides for Top 10 Things .NET Developers Should Know About Ruby

Here's a link to the slides for a talk I gave on Sept 9, 2009 to the Chicago ALT.NET user group, called "Top 10+ Things Every .NET Developer Should Know About Ruby."

Registration Now Open for Essential Javascript

Registration is now open for Essential Javascript, on Oct. 17th, 2009 in Chicago!

The Learnometer

In this article, we declare our opinion on how you, the student of any class or seminar attendee, can measure the effectiveness of the class.

How To Spot a Good Instructor

When you're learning something new, the quality of your instructor makes all the difference. In this article we'll talk about our opinion of what makes a good instructor, and what you should be looking for before you sign up for a seminar at your next conference or workshop.

Join Us at Windy City Rails 2009

PurpleWorkshops will conduct the morning tutorial session at the upcoming Windy City Rails Conference. It's a 3-hour tutorial called REST 101: Best Practices for Rails Developers.

Rails 101: Grouping Controllers in Subdirectories

For large applications, the list of Ruby files in a directory may grow large, and you might wish to create subdirectories to group related classes together. Rails lets you create subdirectories for your classes, but you need to do more than simply move them into a new subdirectory before Rails can find them and use them properly. In this article, we'll show you how to put a controller into a subdirectory and enable Rails to find it automatically.

Agile 101: The Simplest Thing That Could Possibly Work

If you're new to “Do the simplest thing that could possibly work,” and even if you think your understand what it means, read on. I'm going to show you how we implemented a feature on the PurpleWorkshops site that followed this advice to such an extreme, that you might think I'm crazy.

Rails Internals: named_scope Refactored

Come with us as we take a look at the implementation of *named_scope*, a very popular feature of ActiveRecord that first appeared in Rails 2.1. We'll learn how to refactor a complex method into manageable pieces, gaining insight into the innerworkings of Rails.

Ruby 101: Method Definitions

Learn how Ruby objects exhibit behavior through instance methods and class methods.

Technical Articles