When I was first getting started with Ruby, I heard a lot of talk about blocks, and how you could “cast” them to Procs by using the & operator when calling methods. Last week, in comments about my last post (Ruby is NOT a Callable Oriented Language (It’s Object Oriented)), I heard that claim again.

Last night it was my great pleasure to host the Lightning Talks session at RubyConf 2009. We had an amazing series of 20 talks that took just over 2 hours. The tech gremlins seemed to be off drinking somewhere and none of the presentations failed.

Here's a list of all the speakers and links to their stuff.

Introduction

This article will guide you through the process of installing Ruby on Rails, and any other software that is required to begin using it.

This is the first of two articles, Part 1 will show you how to install Ruby on Rails (on Windows) and Part 2 will show you how to create a basic blog.

In order to create a web application with Rails, you will need the following software:

Rack

What the heck is Rack and why is it getting so much press lately? Well, from it’s tag-line: “Rack provides an minimal interface between webservers supporting Ruby and Ruby frameworks.”