NoVaTAIG September 2011 Meeting Summary

September 2011 Monthly Meeting Summary

Topic:
What I Love About Ruby - presentation by Keith Bennett

Although Ruby is best known for the language in which Ruby on Rails is implemented, it is an awesome general purpose programming language in its own right. Its scope goes beyond application development to include software testing frameworks such as Watir and system administration tools such as Puppet and Capistrano. If you appreciate writing software that's easy to read, concise, elegant, expressive, and powerful, then programming in Ruby will be an exhilharating experience, and what I love about Ruby will be what *you* love about Ruby too. Since many attendees are not software developers, we may spend a generous amount of time explaining and illustrating the content in irb, the Ruby interactive shell.
Some of the topics covered were to include:
* Ruby's Concise and Expressive Syntax
* Ruby Literals - Arrays, Hashes, Ranges, Regular Expressions
* Scripting in Ruby
* JRuby as a Better Java
* Ruby Gems
* IRB - the Ruby Interactive Shell
* Jenkins, A Continuous Integration Tool (if time permits)

Presenter Bio:
Keith Bennett is a software developer at LMN Solutions, Inc. in Reston, Virginia. Although his first professionally written program was an accounting tool written in Basic in 1981 on a multithousand dollar microcomputer with 16 K of RAM, he is a technology explorer, continuously retooling with more and more productive technologies. His current prime focus is Ruby, with dabblings in Clojure and Android development.
He has a little teaching experience, including a couple of semesters teaching C language at New York University's School of Continuing Education. A proponent of open source software, open space conferences, and technical collaboration and community, he has spoken at, and assisted in the organization of, various user groups and conferences. A frequent world traveler, he has enjoyed connecting with colleagues in Asia, Latin America, and Europe, as well as those closer to home. A bit of a writer, he has a technical blog at http://krbtech.wordpress.com/.

Took place on: Wed. September 14 2011 6:30 PM

Attendance: 16

Meeting Notes:

During the discussion it was noted that sometimes dealing with Ruby GEMS and versions of GEMS can be a challenge.

IRB (Ruby's interactive shell) can be used as an interactive shell for Java via JRuby

JRuby is a single jar file

With Ruby it's fairly easy to check for diffs between two lists (a useful capability for testing) - example would look something like: List2 - List1

Ruby Mine - an alternative to Ruby's IRB

Ruby functions can have '?' or '!' in a function name

Ruby has a grep method built in

The presentation file contains a number of useful tips and tricks:

A PDF presentation from the meeting is available novataigt_2011_09_what-i-love-about-ruby.pdf (137 KB file size).

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