Max Kiesler – Designer

When I started learning Ruby on Rails a little over a year ago someone in the Ruby community told me there were currently on 164 developers in the United States. Over the course of the last year that number has grown exponentially. As with many next generation technologies the challenge is how to learn it. Often times the only resources for learning are workshops, seminars, books or online tutorials and examples.

This article will present the best Ruby tutorials, examples and downloads I’ve found over the course of the last year. I’ve spent numerous hours searching google, del.icio.us, digg etc.. looking for usable and relevant examples. This list only exists, because of the time and energy of the developers spent providing this information to all of us for free. If you find these tutorials and examples helpful please drop by the developers site’s and let them know how much you appreciate their great work.

If you know of other Ruby tutorials, examples or downloads please submit a comment or email me. Thanks!

Downloads

Rails Blog Apps
Ajax Hierarchical Category and Calendar browser
For a Typo blog

Typo
Ruby on Rails blog software. (Related post: Ruby on Rails Blog Software)

Rails Wiki Apps
Hieraki
Open source, wiki-like system.

Instant Rails

Drop it in your directory – and you’re done

Instiki
A wiki clone which is very easy to use.

Tutorials

Ruby Activity Indicators
Progress Bars with GD2 and Ruby
I went milling about for source for progress bars that would be suitably embedded within a Ruby on Rails application I’m working on and came up with nada.

Ruby Calendar
CalendarGrid

Ruby based calendar

Ruby Chat
AJAX powered chat in 3 hours on Ruby on Rails
A simple Web based chat built with Ruby on Rails. It seems to work okay, but I’ve only tested on FireFox and Safari. On IE it’s bound to look totally out of wack as I’m not sure it supports position: fixed, which I used for the IRC-esque layout.

Ruby Image Manipulation
rmagick
Thumbnailer method for a Rails ‘Photo’ controller

Ruby Learning and Basics
Try Ruby

An interactive ruby tutorial where you can learn some basics right in your browser,

Tutorial in Ruby on Rails
As a newbie, getting started with Rails was tricky without some help from the IRC folks. If you get stuck, that’s a good place for help, as the author hangs out in there pretty regularly. That said, some sample code is worth its weight in gold, so here’s how I got a basic Rails application running.

Learning Ruby
A very good article on the basics of ruby.

Introduction to Ruby
For Perl programmers

Introduction to Ruby
For Mac OS X

Ruby Live Grid
AJAX Live Data Grid Example
Historically, data sub-forms are not something that have been presented well on the web. Pop-up windows and browser page refreshing are a significant regression from the interfaces which have been provided by client/server desktop applications for over a decade. Luckily, with the advent of Rails and its partials rendering, we are in a position to do something about this usability shortfall.

Ruby Login
LoginGenerator
Login & Authentication Generator

Ruby Text Editors

Integrate FCKEditor with your Ruby on Rails application
FCKEditor is an open source Javascript application for embedding a rich text box into an HTML form. I will show you have to integrate this application with your Ruby on Rails application.

Integrating a Rich-text Widget with Struts
The problem was straightforward, all I needed was a rich-text editor that would allow me to create XHTML that I could then send back to the client. I already had a textarea, and I just wanted a rich-text replacement. I thought this was going to be simple, but the problem cost me hours. In this entry, I show the process I used to identify a suitable AJAX/Javascript library, read on…

Ruby Shopping Cart
Open Source Ruby On Rails Shopping Cart | Sublog
The first and only Ruby

Ruby Helpers

Ruby Calendar Helpers

CalendarHelper
Select dates from a calendar popup or in-page

DynamicCalendarHelper
Renders a basic calendar in HTML. Highly configurable and allows for databinding as well as formatting

Ruby Drag and Drop
HowToUseDragAndDropSorting
How to use drag and drop Sorting in Ruby on Rails

Ruby File Uploader

TinyFile
For the longest time I just wanted a quick, ready-to-go example of how to do some basic file uploads in a real rails app. Welcome to TinyFile.

Ruby Live Trees Helpers
LiveTree
DHTML tree widget that can load data asynchronously as-needed

Ruby Pagination Helpers
PaginationHelper
Paginate large tables

Ruby Sorting Helpers

SortHelper
Click column headings to sort tables (uses Ruby to handle sorting)

SortHelper2
Another take on sort via clickable headers (uses SQL to handle sorting)

Sort Helper the third
Sort database result sets with clickable column headers (also uses SQL to handle sorting)

Movtable
A port to rails of Movtable, full featured sort table, filterable, with context menus.

JavascriptSortableTables

Not a Ruby helper as such, but it doesnt require Ajax, Ruby or SQL to work – it’s all in client side Javascript