Bundler: How You Can Start Using It Today

I took some time before I could understand and use Bundler in my Ruby projects. There was something about it that just didn't click with me.

In hindsight, I should have learned Bundler earlier. Once you "get" the workflow, Bundler is very simple and very powerful at the same time. It's one of those well-made tools that makes it dead easy to do simple stuff, and entirely possible to do complex stuff when the time comes.

I wrote a Bundler primer for the latest PragPub, the Pragmatic Programmer's monthly magazine. If you're not using Bundler yet, I hope that this article will turn you into a Bundler user before dinner.

(Even if you don't care about Bundler, the rest of the magazine is likely to have something for you. PragPub is my favourite programming mag ever, and I'm proud to write for them when it happens.)

The method_missing() Chainsaw

I have a guest post about method_missing() on RubyLearning. It's intended for Ruby beginners, but it's attracting interesting discussions in the comments and on Hacker News - mainly from people dissing Dynamic Methods in favor of Ghost Methods.

The Ruby Metaprogramming Spell Book

Here are all the spells from Metaprogramming Ruby, as link-friendly Gists.

March 2014 update: I updated this list to match the second edition of the book. I added three spells that are new to Ruby 2.x: Refinement, Refinement Wrapper and Prepended Wrapper. I also dropped a few spells that don't seem to be as relevant today as they used to be, at least in the context of this book: Argument Array, Named Arguments, Pattern Dispatch and Class Extension Mixin.

RubyKaigi 2010

The scarily efficient organizers of RubyKaigi 2010 only took a few hours to publish the video of my talk on metaprogramming and the Ruby object model (slides and audio only).

Yesterday I also lived the Andy Warhol moment of my life when I signed the first hundred or so copies of Metaprogramming Ruby Japanese Edition together with translator Kado Masanori and Matz. I looked at the long line of people happily waiting half an hour to have their copy signed, and suddenly spending three years to write a book seemed like a perfectly rational thing to do.

Metaprogramming Ruby in Japanese is Out

This is selling great at RubyKaigi in Tsukuba. I'm a happy little author.

Big thanks to my translator, Kado Masanori, and my Japanese editor-in-Chief, Kahei Suzuki.