A lot of things are happening in the Ruby world right now, and I wanted to highlight a few of them here:

• At FOSCon this year, Amy Hoy has asked people to start writing more instructive articles about parts of Ruby or Rails so that newbies would have more "fine manuals" to read. I've tried to do my part with two short series (so far), one on RubyInline and the other on ruby-prof. The RubyInline articles are: RubyInline, making making things faster easier, and RubyInline: Going a bit Further. The ruby-prof articles are: Profile and ruby-prof, ruby-prof and call graphs, and Profile and ruby-prof: getting specific.
• Another blog related event is the current blogging contest being run by Ruby Inside. They're offering $100 US to their favorite informativ, ruby related blog post this week (Aug 14-20). There have been a lot of interesting entries so far. It would be pretty cool to see more contests like this crop up.
• We're getting close to a couple of Ruby conferences, I wrote about RubyConf*MI in my last post. RailsConfEurope is also comingu up quickly. If you're reasonable close to either of these, you should consider registering.
• O'Reilly has released the Ruby Cookbook. It's a massive tome, chock-full of Ruby goodness. I haven't had time to read the whole thing yet, but what I've read looks good, and I'm hearing good things from folks I trust. Looks like another good book to add to your Ruby bookshelf.
• APress is getting ready to jump into Ruby and Rails in a big way. They've got ten titles listed on their 'Rails Roadmap', and have lined up some well known Ruby names to write for them. They're still looking for some Ruby authors according to this blog post.
• No Starch Press is also starting to make some Ruby related noises. I can't be specific yet, but there's a good looking Ruby book on its way into their catalog. If the book is half as good as what they've talked to me about, it's going to be another 'must have'.
• The Pragmatic Programmers also look like they're set to add some more titles to their Facets of Ruby line. James Gray has said that he's writing a book for them that should be announced soon, Ezra Zygmuntowicz also has a book on the way, and I've recently signed a contract with them for a Ruby related book. It looks like the PragProgs aren't going to be content to sit on their Ruby laurels.
• Finally, Developerdotstar is close to announcing a couple of books about programming. Neither of these is Ruby specific, but from everything I've heard I think they're going to be solid, language independant books about becoming a better programmer. Just the kind of thing you'd expect from these guys.

Hopefully, you've enjoyed this quick spin arond the Ruby (ad related) community. Next week, I hope to talk about a couple of specific projects and how they're doing in terms of development and keeping the community informed. A lot of projects do pretty well at the first, but fall down a bit on the second — hopefully this will help all of us do better.

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-pate
http://on-ruby.blogspot.com