A compact stone or library for improving Ruby skills?

Question

I am an advanced Ruby programmer for beginners / intermediate. I am really working on improving my Ruby skills, focusing on writing a more efficient, compact, idiomatic Ruby, following solid testing methods, and studying and adhering to the project structure and other general guidelines.

With that in mind, I was looking for good material to study. I checked out a couple of Play By Play Peepcode screencasts that are great, but not quite what I'm looking for. I pushed towards Github, but most of the projects that I am familiar with can be quite stretched out - I spend too much time revealing how everything really fits together and tries to create a mental model of things, which I really do understand the time development process. So, I am looking for good examples of quality projects / gems / libs that are compact, well built, etc. I would prefer something self-sufficient, i.e. It does not extend the functionality of any other tool that I would first need to parse before understanding "extension". In addition, the focus here is on developing Ruby, not developing Ruby on Rails. Any suggestions?

Answer 1

You say you're an excellent candidate for the Ruby Mendicant University course - it targets intermediate rubies who want to improve just what you like, he said. I really recommend you check this out (I'm alum).

Even if you do not take the course, the exercises for the course (which may be somewhat far-fetched) and all student projects (which are real projects). All of them were written by students about the fact that your level was a mentor to more advanced people with an emphasis on making the code more idiomatic and following best practices.

Answer 2

The best resource I've found is Eloquent Ruby by Rick Olsen, which is a detailed guide to writing idiomatic Ruby and discussing your choices.