Getting started with Ruby on Rails

Today Smashing Magazine published an article I wrote last week about Ruby on Rails. Instead of just doing another tutorial, I gave a rough overview of how Rails works, together with a lot of praise of the language and the framework.

I tried to spark interest in Rails and Ruby and judging from the first comments I think it worked :)

The text released today is only the first part, covering just enough Ruby to understand the second part coming out next week. If you like the article, please digg it or promote it on reddit/delicious/slashdot.

The monad tutorial to bind them all

Many thanks to zipMe who provided some extremely valuable links in the comments to my last entry. You could have invented monads is the monad tutorial I have always longed for.
It explains the basics (the monad interface) and then describes how these basics can be used to achieve the various stuff you always see monads being used for (sequential programming, side effects) all with very focused examples and excercises, without much Haskell background needed. Not too theoretical to recognize the connection to Haskell, nor too practical to provide insight about the ideas behind monads.

F# Observations

I’m feeling all mad-scientistic tonight, sipping coke, with 30 tabs open in Opera :)

On my journey into the weird world of functional programming on the .NET CLR, I continue to stumble upon interesting stuff. Papers, articles, interviews, each worthy of hours of dedication. Alas, my day still has only 24 hours (I need to work around that somehow), so at the time being I can’t do much more than glance over everything. more…