Podcast: Play in new window | Download According to The Pragmatic Programmer by Andy Hunt and Dave Thomas, “Every piece of knowledge must have a single, unambiguous, authoritative representation within a system.” Last week I talked about extending your Ruby on Rails application. This is because in many cases in order to avoid repeating your logic across multiple classes (models or... 

Podcast: Play in new window | Download I’m going to be talking about the DRY principle next week. However, before I jump into that, I need to discuss how to extend Ruby on Rails so you know where you can put functionality to keep your application DRY. There are a couple of standard places people put code that isn’t a Model, View, Controller, or Helper: The ‘lib’ folder – This is... 

Podcast: Play in new window | Download Ruby has a package manager for its libraries or gems. It should be a concept familiar with other package managers like apt, yum, or yast. Gems are libraries for Ruby. Many gems are built to extend Ruby on Rails and are a great way to add functionality to your application. You can see available gems at RubyGems.org. In order to install Rails, you typically...