I’ve been working with the Ruby language since March 2008. So (as of this writing) I’m still on the n00b path.
Assertions
The first thing I did was to follow the great advice of Dierk Koenig, writer of Groovy in Action and general Groovy / Grails advocate. The book itself doesn’t use the typical print-the-result-based code examples; it encourages the reader to learn the language through assertions. And that’s how I learned Groovy; I took the examples from the book, paraphrased them, tried variations on a theme, and then asserted that my results were true. Now when I need to know how to use a language feature, I simply look back at my assertion code to re-edjumicate myself.
I learned the core Ruby language via Test::Unit. I cannot recommend this technique enough for coming up to speed on a language!
Podcasts
With that under my belt, plus some command-line scripts and a solid Rails project, I’m not spending time back-consuming posts from the following Podcast blogs:
Rubyology
I’m actively back-consuming a lot of content from this wealth that Chris Matthieu has provided. There are some great talks on Journeta, using EC2, great tutorials covering basic and RoR, and some scaling recommendations.
sd.rb Podcast
Straight from the mouth of the San Diego Ruby Users group. A good variety of topics, focusing more on the Ruby language than on the Rails poster-child itself. Nice talks on rspec, MySQL clustering and Arduino, amongst many others.
Railscasts
With 145 postings and counting, there’s a lot to be consumed here. However, this is the last on my list, because none of them download to my iPhone 3G :( . Lots of cross coverage on Capistrano, Partials, custom Routes, ruby-debug … the list goes on.
Ruby on Rails Podcast
Geoffrey Grosenbach’s podcasts are seminal. I’ll leave it up to the reader to pore through the years of accumulated wisdom. How can you go wrong when you’re part of the rubyonrails.org domain!
A number of these feeds provide screencasts and/or video. A few of the files are old-school QuickTime MOVs which are problematic for the iPhone, which is annoying (definitely not the podcaster’s fault … get your head in gear, Apple).
And unfortunately when I break away to write down something in Evernote.app, and there’s any visuals associated with the cast, the iPhone halts playback. Grr. So I’m getting into the archaic habit of creating a Notes page and mailing it to myself 
In Summary
I recommend each and all of these podcasts. Be prepared to sink a lot of time into them, so you might as well upload them onto your iPhone and take them to the beach!
NOTE: If your screen reader is reading this, please
contact me at admin@cantremember.com ... because it shouldn't.
FIXME: build this dynamically based upon the maximum content in any sub-Element of this Element.
I will call this my "Safari Reader Counterweight".
In some of my Posts, I have huge code excerpts, etc.
Safari Reader, at least in iOS, will identify the 'main Element', the one it features, based upon its content length.
Sometimes those code excerpts get identified as the 'main Element', and the Post is borked in Safari Reader mode.
This is a counter-weight; it gives the <main> Element additional content so that it gets featured, algorithmically.
Yes, it increases the payload of every page (@see FIXME above).
But not by
that much.
Then again, this is a guess as to how much content any given Element could contain.
If it's not enough,
BOOM, Safari Reader looks like crap.
So, here's a great article on
how to enable Safari Reader on your site.
It's mostly guesswork, but those guesses helped me debug this obtuse goddamn problem.
Oh, and look,
you can enter and exit Reader programmatically.
JavaScript can fix anything.
I promise I will never cut-and-paste lines of text simply to add Element payload.
I promise I will never cut-and-paste lines of text simply to add Element payload.
I promise I will never cut-and-paste lines of text simply to add Element payload.
I promise I will never cut-and-paste lines of text simply to add Element payload.
I promise I will never cut-and-paste lines of text simply to add Element payload.
I promise I will never cut-and-paste lines of text simply to add Element payload.
I promise I will never cut-and-paste lines of text simply to add Element payload.
I promise I will never cut-and-paste lines of text simply to add Element payload.
I promise I will never cut-and-paste lines of text simply to add Element payload.
I promise I will never cut-and-paste lines of text simply to add Element payload.
I promise I will never cut-and-paste lines of text simply to add Element payload.
I promise I will never cut-and-paste lines of text simply to add Element payload.
I promise I will never cut-and-paste lines of text simply to add Element payload.
I promise I will never cut-and-paste lines of text simply to add Element payload.
I promise I will never cut-and-paste lines of text simply to add Element payload.
I promise I will never cut-and-paste lines of text simply to add Element payload.
I promise I will never cut-and-paste lines of text simply to add Element payload.
I promise I will never cut-and-paste lines of text simply to add Element payload.
I promise I will never cut-and-paste lines of text simply to add Element payload.
I promise I will never cut-and-paste lines of text simply to add Element payload.
I promise I will never cut-and-paste lines of text simply to add Element payload.
I promise I will never cut-and-paste lines of text simply to add Element payload.
I promise I will never cut-and-paste lines of text simply to add Element payload.
I promise I will never cut-and-paste lines of text simply to add Element payload.
