tools episodes

This episode will walk you through setting up a Rails project on subversion. It covers some helpful tips and gotchas you may experience along the way.

RJS and AJAX can be difficult to debug. Many times you don't get any error message in the browser. Learn different techniques for solving these tricky problems in this episode.

The Rails console is one of my favorite tools. This episode is packed with tips and tricks on how to get the most out of the console.

The Rails API docs are very useful but can be difficult to read. This episode will give some tips on reading the docs and mention a few alternative sites for accessing the API. Update: sorry about the broken movie, it should work now.

This episode will show you how to debug a rails app using ruby-debug: set a breakpoint, inspect variables, change the code and more.

Learn all about the logger in this episode. See how to send messages to the log and how to customize it.

Rails comes with many built-in generators, but what if you want to customize them or make your own? Rails gives you a great way to do this which you will learn in this episode.

Rake is one of those tools that you don't realize how powerful it is until you start using it. In this episode you will learn how to create custom rake tasks and improve them by using rake features.

Application configuration shouldn't be spread throughout your code base. Instead a much better place to put it is an external YAML file. See how to do that in this episode.

Have you ever wanted to easily log all variables? Now you can by using some advanced Ruby concepts as shown in this episode.

Git has been getting a lot of buzz lately, and for good reason. It's an excellent SCM which in many ways is more simple and powerful than subversion. See how to set up a Rails project with Git in this episode.

In order to improve performance of your Rails application you need to find the bottlenecks. A great starting point is your production log. In this episode you will see how to use RAWK to analyze your log file and determine which controller actions take up the most processing time.

You can use profiling to determine where the performance bottlenecks are in specific Rails actions. Watch this episode for details.

Rails 2.1 Release Candidate 1 was just released! In this episode I will show you how to install it into your Rails project.