Why "require 'rubygems'" In Your Library/App/Tests Is Wrong

I have been suitably convinced...



http://gist.github.com/54177

Recommended Ruby, Rails, REST books!

I have read the following books (some more closely than others). I'd recommend each of them for various reasons. All have been helpful in understanding many of the pragmatic concepts baked into Rails, understanding the Ruby programming language, and web development in general. I hope you have a chance to check them out on your own path of learning!
:Mark

RESTful Web Services

The Ruby Way, Second Edition: Solutions and Techniques in Ruby Programming (2nd Edition) (Addison-Wesley Professional Ruby Series)

The Rails Way (Addison-Wesley Professional Ruby Series)

Design Patterns in Ruby (Addison-Wesley Professional Ruby Series)

Ruby for Rails: Ruby Techniques for Rails Developers

Prototype and Scriptaculous in Action [Ajax]

Advanced Rails Recipes

Developing Facebook Platform Applications with Rails (Pragmatic Programmers)

Agile Web Development with Rails, 2nd Edition

'Daemon' by Daniel Suarez

Daemon, by Daniel Suarez. This looks like a really fun read, going to grab it! Check it out.

'carl_spackler' about to get ORM-ified

...yup, it's time... no more mysql gem... Should have done this earlier, but no better time than the present to implement...

...this weekend...going to convert any [current 'carl_spackler'] database queries that are mysql-specific, into ActiveRecord calls. This way, someone is just one adapter change away from using their database, any db they want that ActiveRecord supports, with Spackler. ...but really, it will make things easy for me to write to my db using the ActiveRecord syntactical sugar. Laziness... a virtue!

ActiveRecord::Base.establish_connection({
   :adapter => "sqlite",
   :dbfile => "db/mygolfdb.sqlite"
})

normalizing up 3 part names -- initial stake in ground

...all tests passing... ...collecting all 2008 PGATour data, and more Euro data now...

There are ZERO orphans in the 2008 PGATour data right now. Have collected each and every player's data for 36 tournaments in 2008. Including any other 3 part names.

The Player class is not in its ultimate form, but it is there and it splits names appropriately... still doesn't flatten special wacky characters and I'm not using any Bayesian techniques yet, but takes care of the 3 part names accurately: Jose Maria Olazabal, David Berganio Jr., Davis Love III, etc, etc.... also had to RegEx out of things like "Davis Love III (PB)"... the (PB) indicating the course name.

re = /\(\w{2}\)/
processed = name.gsub(re, "")

...re-scraping about 75 tournaments for PGA and Euro Tour with new names in the next 15 mins... pushed the new code to the carl_spackler GitHub repo .

CARL_SPACKLER::Player class:

vote for GitHub

Vote for GitHub as best bootstrapped startup in 2008. It takes 2 seconds and they are truly deserving:
http://crunchies2008.techcrunch.com/votes/?nominee_id=8&category_id=2