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Ask HN: Learning Ruby/RoR -- Which open source projects should I learn from?

11 points by apsurd ↗ HN
It's ruby time! I ditched xp for ubuntu to streamline my quest into ruby/rails. I followed the guides @ http://guides.rubyonrails.org/ which are very helpful, thanks!

Can the rails veterans recommend some open source projects I can learn from? I'm looking for best practices and well structured code to model after. Thanks HN.

6 comments

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pook
the Pickaxe Book is maybe the best resource on starting Ruby. The Poignant Guide ought to be its preface.

http://ruby-doc.org/docs/ProgrammingRuby/

Also, check out the Rubyquiz. It's a weekly programming challenge much in the spirit of Project Euler; something to cut your chops on.

http://rubyquiz.com/

Edit: These aren't quite what you're asking for, but you'll find plenty of very elegant code to study.

crazydiamond
Since you are looking for open source projects you can study the source of: Rails itself, Highline (JEG), Choice, Shooes (GUI).
mc
For fun, I dove into this recently. The only strong opinion I have is for Rails projects to ship with Cucumber as means for acceptance testing. Here are a few good Rails projects which satisfy that.

* The Rails Dev Directory: http://github.com/engineyard/rails_dev_directory/

* Spree: http://github.com/railsdog/spree

* And Gemcutter: http://github.com/qrush/gemcutter. Gemcutter also uses Gemfile.

* Fat Free CRM: http://github.com/michaeldv/fat_free_crm. It doesn't use Cucumber, but it's still good code.

If you want to get setup with Rails 3.0, check out this gist I wrote: https://gist.github.com/50be644a99ff372d5b1f