Sometimes, it’s easy to become overwhelmed by how much there is to learn in this industry. If jQuery happens to be on your personal “need to learn soon” list, then I’m happy to announce my new course: “Learn jQuery in 30 Days”. If you’ll give me fifteen minutes a day for the next month, I’ll help you become a jQuery pro – and it’s free! How Does it Work? Sporadically, your skills will be put to the test, when you take the interactive quizzes! Once you enroll (free) via email, each day, you’ll receive a 10-15 minute video lesson. As...

Web development is an industry that’s in a state of constant flux with technologies and jargon changing and mutating in an endless cycle. Not to mention the sheer deluge of information one has to process everyday. In this series, published monthly, we’ll seek to rectify this by bringing you all the important news, announcements, releases and interesting discussions within the web development industry in a concise package. Join me after the jump for an extra dose of community content this month! News and Releases All of the important news in a single place: releases, announcements, companies bickering, security issues and all related hoopla. ‘HTML5...

Sooner or later, all developers are required to interact with an API. The most difficult part is always related to reliably testing the code we write, and, as we want to make sure that everything works properly, we continuosly run code that queries the API itself. This process is slow and inefficient, as we can experience network issues and data inconsistencies (the API results may change). Let’s review how we can avoid all of this effort with Ruby. Our Goal “Flow is essential: write the tests, run them and see them fail, then write the minimal implementation code to make them pass....

Sooner or later, all developers are required to interact with an API. The most difficult part is always related to reliably testing the code we write, and, as we want to make sure that everything works properly, we continuosly run code that queries the API itself. This process is slow and inefficient, as we can experience network issues and data inconsistencies (the API results may change). Let’s review how we can avoid all of this effort with Ruby. Our Goal “Flow is essential: write the tests, run them and see them fail, then write the minimal implementation code to make them pass....

One of the nicer things about developing on the Ruby platform is the sheer amount of meticulously categorized, highly reusable code wrapped up as aptly named ‘gems’. I’m sure you’ve heard of popular frameworks like Sinatra or the super popular Rails but you’re missing an entire spectrum of gems that handle issues at a much lower level. Start using these and watch your productivity shoot through the roof! A Quick Note I’m well aware that some of the gems listed here have Rails, or parts of Rails, as a dependency. That doesn’t mean that they are any less useful or need to...