Brian Marick wrote this great book. Brian is a well known testing guru, but this books appeals to a much wider audience. Through a few simple scripts he teaches people how to code every day tasks in ruby.

It’s a short and easy read of nearly 300 pages and requires no previous ruby knowledge. If you already know ruby, this book is probably too slow, but if you come from any other language, it’s a great book.

In the end, it’s better to avoid creating stubborn dragons in the first place and to slay them early if they start to turn bad. Young dragons are easier to slay than old ones. You may even slay several dragons before you are happy that you have one you can live with.

Image source

The rumor mill says, that we will soonish see tons of interesting Javascript and Ruby stuff there .. thanks to one project in winter country :-).

Dakota tribal wisdom says that when you discover you are riding a dead horse, the best strategy is to dismount. However, in business we often try other strategies with dead horses, including the following:

• Buying a stronger whip.
• Changing riders.
• Say things like, "This is the way we have always ridden this horse."
• Appointing a committee to study the horse.
• Arranging to visit other sites to see how they ride dead horses.
• Increasing the standards to ride dead horses.
• Appointing a tiger team to revive the dead horse.
• Creating a training session to increase our riding ability.
• Comparing the state of dead horses in todays environment.
• Change the requirements declaring that "This horse is not dead."
• Hire contractors to ride the dead horse.
• Harnessing several dead horses together for increased speed.
• Declaring that "No horse is too dead to beat."
• Providing additional funding to increase the horse’s performance.
• Do a Cost Analysis study to see if contractors can ride it cheaper.
• Purchase a product to make dead horses run faster.
• Declare the horse is "better, faster and cheaper" dead.
• Form a quality circle to find uses for dead horses.
• Revisit the performance requirements for horses.
• Say this horse was procured with cost as an independent variable.
• Promote the dead horse to a supervisory position.

Nice thread int he extremeprogramming-ML