Welcome to Ruby on Rails Tutorial: Learn Rails by Example. The goal of this book is to be the best answer to the question, “If I want to learn web development with Ruby on Rails, where should I start?” By the time you finish Ruby on Rails Tutorial, you will have all the knowledge you need to develop and deploy your own custom web applications. You will also be ready to benefit from the many more advanced books, blogs, and screencasts that are part of the thriving Rails educational ecosystem. Finally, since Ruby on Rails Tutorial uses Rails 3.0, the knowledge you gain here will be fully up-to-date with the latest and greatest version of Rails.1
Norwegian Rubyist August Lilleaas has been busy putting together a ton of examples of using the Net::HTTP Ruby library that comes with most Ruby distributions. I asked him if it'd be okay to put some of them directly on Ruby Inside for reference purposes and he said "No problem!"
"There are about a million ways to make a choropleth map. You know, the maps that color regions by some metric. The problem is that a lot of solutions require expensive software or have a high learning curve...or both. What if you just want a simple map without all the GIS stuff? In this post, I'll show you how to make a county-specific choropleth map using only free tools."
In the following 13 steps, we'll walk you through how we identify top blogs on any topic, how we quickly figure out what their most popular recent posts have been about, how we incorporate their blog archives into our knowledge about the field and how we find where else they are participating in conversation around the web. Going through the whole process takes us less time than it took us to write this post.
"The tsearch2 module is available to add as an extension to the PostgreSQL database to allow for Full Text Indexing. This document is an introduction to installing, configuring, using and maintaining the database with the tsearch2 module activated."