PeepCode Products

Meet the Command Line

Thu, 28 May 2009 16:47:58 +0000

by Dan Benjamin, System Developer of A List Apart.
Bonus PDF by Casimir Saternos.

This screencast is for you if you’ve never used the Unix command line, or are learning it for the first time.

Navigating a text-based terminal can be intimidating at first, but experienced developer and systems administrator Dan Benjamin introduces it smoothly one concept at a time whether you’re currently using Windows, Mac OS X, or Linux.

In this 70 minute screencast you’ll learn about the basic assumptions of Unix, how to look for help, and how to confidently work with files, directories, and programs. Also included is a bonus 60 page PDF reference guide!

This screencast covers:

The Unix OS
Tips & Gotchas
Getting Help
Terminal Clients
Downloading the Samples
Installing the Developer Tools
Elements of the Prompt
File Paths
Arguments & Flags
Listing Files
Changing Directories
Pipes & Redirection
Archiving & Compression
Delete, Copy, Move
Managing Directories
The Superuser
Permissions
Remote Control
Transferring Files
Conclusion

Most PeepCode screencasts assume that you know how to navigate the filesystem and issue commands. Most open source projects such as Ruby on Rails require similar knowledge as well. Watching this screencast will equip you to operate the command line confidently!

A future screencast in this series will cover more advanced command line topics for experienced developers.

Available to PeepCode Unlimited Subscribers or alone for only US$9!

Meet MacRuby

Tue, 19 May 2009 15:53:42 +0000

by Alex Vollmer and Geoffrey Grosenbach

MacRuby takes the “almost” out of “almost a desktop experience.” With MacRuby, you can write real Mac OS X desktop applications with Ruby.

MacRuby is a Ruby interpreter built by Apple on top of Objective-C. Unlike other scripting interfaces to the Cocoa frameworks, MacRuby objects are fully functional peers of Objective-C objects with no translation layer. This means that your Ruby applications can do almost anything a compiled application could do, and at near-native speed.

You’ll build a functional Twitter client from scratch, learning about both Cocoa and MacRuby along the way. You’ll design an application graphically with Interface Builder and learn about the major design patterns in Cocoa applications. You’ll work with network resources, parse XML, and POST data back to the server so you’ll be ready to write your own web-enabled desktop applications.

This screencast covers

What is MacRuby?
The basic syntax of MacRuby
What you need to know about Objective-C to write MacRuby apps
Building a basic application
How to learn Cocoa and read the documentation
Submitting network credentials with HTTP Basic Auth
Designing with concurrency in mind and avoiding the spinning beachball of death
Displaying tweets in a table view
One-step authentication
Reloading tweets
Posting to a REST-based web service
Packaging the Application

Watching this screencast will give you a head start toward becoming familiar and confident with programming Cocoa applications on the Mac with Ruby!

A future screencast in this series will cover the still-in-development HotCocoa frameworks for MacRuby.

Available to PeepCode Unlimited Subscribers or alone for only US$9!

Functional Programming with Clojure

Fri, 24 Apr 2009 01:36:01 +0000

By Phil Hagelberg. Technical editing by Clojure creator Rich Hickey

Clojure is a dynamic functional programming language designed to be as approachable as scripting languages, yet harness the power of multi-core machines in the manner of more cryptic languages such as Erlang.

In this 65 minute screencast, Clojure expert Phil Hagelberg walks through the stages of building a multi-user text adventure game (code available). It’s the perfect project to learn about the basics of Clojure while having a fun time doing it, too!

You’ll learn:

The basic concepts and syntax of Clojure
How to write a basic multi-threaded echo server
How to use the basic data structures, including thread-safety
How to optimize with lazy collections
Coordinating data across threads
Unit testing
Common idioms
Packaging and release of your project

You’ve heard about functional programming. You want to write efficient programs that maximize current hardware. This screencast is the place to start! You’ll also learn about Lisp, one of the foundational programming languages of the modern computer era.

In addition, this screencast is the first to use a brand new post-production workflow from PeepCode, featuring informative motion graphics and animated diagrams! Check out the preview.

Available to PeepCode Unlimited Subscribers or as a single purchase for only US$9!

NOTE: A free 5-minute screencast on Clojure IDEs will be uploaded soon.

Screencasting with Final Cut Pro

Fri, 27 Mar 2009 21:03:24 +0000

Screencasts are a great way to promote your product, educate your customers, or teach your co-workers. A screencast of your desktop, iPhone, or web-based product can quickly convince people to signup for an account or purchase a copy. They’re also a great way to promote your skills online as part of a screencast blog.

This 56 minute video reveals deep secrets learned over nearly 3 years of publishing PeepCode screencasts. You’ll learn the bare basics of Apple’s Final Cut Pro video editor so you can edit and export high quality screencasts.

It also presents scripts and other techniques for staging your screencast and getting consistent results every time.

Chapters include:

Intro
Plan: Directories
Record: Placement, Capture
Window & Title Scripts
Static and Movie Export
Edit: Preferences, Session, Speed, Freeze Frame, Watermarking
Audio: Equipment, Post-Production, Export
Export: Quicktime, Compressor, Multi-core

Available to PeepCode Unlimited Subscribers or as a single purchase for only US$9!

Control Your Email Inbox

Wed, 18 Mar 2009 02:57:37 +0000

By Lars Pinds of CoachTVBlog.

Email is both an indispensable and an inescapable part of our lives. Yet most of us either feel dread when checking email, or we use email as a distraction from more important tasks.

In this 45 minute presentation, accomplished entrepreneur and life coach Lars Pind presents a system that he has developed and taught to many people over several years. It combines ideas from GTD and Inbox Zero and adds other concrete strategies for facing up to your email and attacking it with a consistent plan.

If you don’t have an email strategy, if you feel bogged down by the amount of email in your inbox, or if you want a better solution, help is on the way! View this screencast today and regain control of your email inbox!

Chapters include:

Why?
About the system
Principles
A scheduled activity
Making the change
Breaking the Addiction
An exercise
The Folders
Checking email
Gmail Tips
A typical session
Filters
Now What?
The other folders
Getting Started
That’s it!
Sticking to it
Summary
Next steps
Conclusion

Available to PeepCode Unlimited Subscribers or as a single purchase for only US$9!

Objective-C for Rubyists

Wed, 11 Feb 2009 08:28:17 +0000

Technical editing by Scott Stevenson of CocoaDevCentral and Theocacao.

If you know Ruby and you want to write applications for Mac OS X or the iPhone, you’re in a great place to start! This concise and content-packed 80-minute screencast will teach you what you need to know to start programming in Objective-C.

Objective-C and Ruby both share many features, thanks to their shared inspirations from Smalltalk. You can use your knowledge of Ruby (or even Python) to understand many of the core concepts of Objective-C. This screencast also covers crucial concepts that are not part of Ruby, such as memory management and the extensive use of the delegate pattern.

Better yet, you’ll learn how to do Test-Driven Development in Objective-C as you learn the language!

This screencast covers

Using Xcode or TextMate as an editor
Setting up your test environment
Basic syntax
Working with objects
Creating custom objects
Working with network resources
Adding functionality with categories
Understanding the delegate
Working with memory

Whether you’re planning to write applications for the iPhone or just want to see if you can do it (you can!), this is the screencast for you.

Available to PeepCode Unlimited Subscribers or alone for only US$9!

Haml and Sass

Tue, 13 Jan 2009 01:41:42 +0000

Haml blesses those who use it with freedom from the verbosity of HTML and from the banality of un-programmable CSS. You can get straight to work thinking about your code instead of trudging through the boilerplate of angle brackets and closing tags.

With Sass your CSS becomes smart. Much, much smarter.

Since its initial release in 2007, the Haml templating library has been adopted by increasing numbers of high profile consultancies (Unspace, Hashrocket) and Ruby frameworks (Rails, Merb, Sinatra). It’s even been ported to PHP and Python!

This hour long screencast will get you up and running with both Haml and Sass. You’ll learn:

The basic philosophy and elements of Haml
Common errors, constraints, and workarounds
How to use Haml alone or with a web framework
How to generate XML much more quickly than XML Builder
Integration with Rails (and even Sinatra for prototyping)
The ideas and capabilities of Sass stylesheets
Advanced and upcoming features of Sass

Whether you’re planning to use Haml or just want to learn about a new perspective on generating HTML, XML, and CSS, this is the screencast for you. It’s also a great way to show a co-worker or friend how easy it is to use Haml!

Available to PeepCode Unlimited Subscribers or alone for only US$9!

Meet Emacs

Tue, 23 Dec 2008 02:38:21 +0000

The classic Gnu Emacs text editor is an incredibly powerful piece of software that has been used by thousands of programmers over the last few decades. Many alpha geeks have recently been giving Emacs a second look as well.

Emacs Lisp expert Phil Hagelberg prepared the script and accompanying code for this screencast. You’ll learn how to get comfortable with his Emacs Starter Kit which includes a suite of sensible defaults and handy shortcuts. In addition to learning about the basic philosophies and approach of Emacs, you’ll learn how to:

Get and install emacs for your platform.
Operate the various key sequences.
Use the built in version control and Git-specific features.
Take advantage of code completion and linking.
Customize your setup with key bindings, color themes, and third-party libraries.

Whether you’re looking at Emacs for fulltime development or just want to be comfortable with a terminal-based text editor for remote deployment and debugging, this screencast will get you there. You may even find that learning the basics of Emacs helps you to be more efficient in your editor of choice since many text editors and web apps (such as TextMate, Gmail, and various terminals) implement Emacs key bindings.

Available to PeepCode Unlimited Subscribers or alone for only US$9!

Productivity for Programmers

Tue, 25 Nov 2008 21:46:32 +0000

Productivity. You know you want it, but how do you get there?

We’ve collaborated with accomplished entrepreneur, developer, and life coach Lars Pind to bring you a practical plan customized for programmers.

Programming is hard work that requires creativity, problem solving, and even physical stamina. Over the course of 40 minutes, Lars will teach you how to

Set achievable, measurable goals
Prepare for the work of thinking
Achieve focus
Find shortcuts
Maximize your natural rhythm and energy

We’ve personally benefited from the ideas presented here and we’re confident that you will, too.

Now with 25% more pixels than the competition! Uses a full 1000×600 of screen real estate for easier viewing. Decorated with top quality video footage and beautiful nature photography. Includes a 17 page typed transcript.

XMPP/Jabber with Ruby

Fri, 31 Oct 2008 19:26:51 +0000

Technical editing by Joshua Sierles, sysadmin at 37signals.

Content by Geoffrey Grosenbach in collaboration with Casimir Saternos.

Part of our job at PeepCode is to research new and upcoming technologies that alpha geeks are talking about. XMPP/Jabber instant messaging has been getting more buzz recently. What is it? What does it do? How can you use it to enhance your applications?

XMPP is an open, real-time instant messaging platform that is useful for sending and receiving notifications between servers and humans. You can use it to receive administrative notifications from your website or to push notifications to subscribers much more efficiently than current poll-based solutions such as RSS.

After viewing this 48 minute screencast, you’ll be able to work with XMPP from Ruby, including:

Connect to a Jabber server
Send presence notifications and update the user icon
Receive message notifications and friend requests
Use DRb (distributed Ruby) together with Jabber to send messages from a Rails application

Available to all PeepCode Unlimited subscribers, or as a single item for only $9!

Now with 25% more pixels than the competition! Uses a full 1000×600 of screen real estate with smoother, high frame rate animations.

Thinking Sphinx PDF

Fri, 24 Oct 2008 01:07:22 +0000

MySQL (or Postgres) does a fine job when querying specific rows, but it’s not so great when it comes to searching on large text fields. Sphinx is a search service that makes full text searching quite easy and throws in extra features like boolean search (“rails OR merb”), word proximity, and custom filtering.

Pat Allan is the author of the popular Thinking Sphinx plugin for Rails (and Merb apps that use ActiveRecord!). He also wrote the Riddle gem for lower level interaction with Sphinx. Pat starts out by introducing the basic features of Sphinx, then dives straight into installation on popular platforms.

In this 60-page PDF you’ll learn to build an address book with Thinking Sphinx starting with simple searches then progressing onto filtered, sorted, and delta-based searches. You’ll learn about the geo-searching features of Sphinx, including integration with Google Maps.

He closes out the book with a 20-page reference that you’ll want to keep close as you use the more advanced features of Sphinx.

If you use MySQL or Postgres databases with text fields, this book will teach all you’ll need to know to work confidently with Sphinx.

Included for all PeepCode Unlimited subscribers or available as a single purchase for only US$9!

Chapters

Understanding Sphinx
Installation
Building an Address Book with Sphinx
Reference
Additional Resources

Unobtrusive Prototype.js

Wed, 15 Oct 2008 23:20:48 +0000

By Jarkko Laine, workshop teacher and author of the Apress book Beginning Ruby on Rails E-Commerce

Modern web developers have learned to organize their server-side code into model, view, and controller.

Your front-end development can also benefit from organization into content and behavior, which is much easier to accomplish than you might think. Dare I say that it makes front-end web programming as easy as Visual Basic’s object and event hooks?

Jarkko Laine steps through the features of Dan Webb’s Low Pro library to help you attach functionality to HTML elements and events. You’ll see how Prototype.js can drive a full-featured application and give you organizational tools to keep your Javascript code maintainable.

Chapters include:

Towards Accessible Javascript
Brief History or Javascript on Rails
Introducing Low Pro
Refactoring an Existing Rails Application
Going DRY With Multiple Elements
Bubbling Performance with Event Delegation
More on Behavior Classes

Refactoring your front end code will make it easier to work with, easier to extend, and easier to use. Get the scoop with this PeepCode PDF book.

Available to all PeepCode Unlimited subscribers or as a single purchase for only US$9.

CouchDB with Rails

Tue, 23 Sep 2008 05:33:48 +0000

Technical editing by CouchDB committers Jan Lehnardt and Chris Anderson

NOTE: Parts of CouchDB and supporting libraries have changed since this screencast was initially released. We’ll be updating the screencast to match in early June. If you purchase before then, you’ll get a free upgrade to the corrected screencast and code.

Imagine a world where there is no SQL. Your database doesn’t have a schema. You don’t have to worry about indexes. Replication is built-in. Scaling is part of the plan from day one.

This is the world promised to you by CouchDB, an Apache Foundation incubator project in the genre of Amazon’s SimpleDB (but open source!). This 60 minute screencast clearly explains the forward-thinking features of CouchDB and shows you how to use CouchDB with Rails.

This screencast is the product of months of research, a trip across the world to Berlin, hours of coding on the CouchRest gem, and technical editing by a pair of CouchDB committers.

You’ll learn how to install CouchDB from source, how to use the CouchRest gem, and you’ll build a personal notes application that uses CouchDB. You’ll learn about different ways to serialize Ruby objects to JSON. You’ll write custom views in Javascript and synchronize them to your database. Oh, and you’ll also learn a bit about the daring personal history behind the CouchDB project!

Whether you’re planning to use CouchDB on an upcoming Ruby project or just want to be informed about current developments in database technology, you’ll find it in this screencast.

The code used in the screencast is included. A typed transcript is also included with the code download. Video is in our new extra-wide 1000×600 format!

Available to PeepCode Unlimited Subscribers or alone for only US$9.

Rails on Facebook

Thu, 31 Jul 2008 00:39:35 +0000

by Facebooker plugin committers Shane Vitarana and David Clements

People are spending an increasing amount of time on social networks. Facebook is arguably the most popular worldwide social network and offers a simple API for offering your applications to tens of millions of users with Facebook accounts.

This 67 page PDF will get you up and running with the Facebooker plugin. You’ll learn to install and configure the plugin. You’ll send HTML, Javascript, and images to Facebook (with caching). You’ll learn about the parts of Facebook that you can augment. Finally, you’ll learn how to write tests for your Facebook application.

BONUS! Includes a 10 minute screencast that shows how to create and configure the demo application on Facebook.

The open source Ruby Footprints application is used as an example, with code available on GitHub.

Included for all PeepCode Unlimited subscribers, or available as a single copy for only $9!

Phusion Passenger

Fri, 04 Jul 2008 02:41:40 +0000

Technical editing by the creators of Phusion Passenger™.

Phusion Passenger™ dropped onto the scene in early 2008 and immediately caused quite a stir.

Many developers have hoped for a way to run Rails applications natively inside Apache, and now it’s possible! Passenger™ makes development easier and is the best way to run Rails applications on shared hosts. You may even find it so easy to use that you choose to deploy your production applications with it as well.

After viewing this 54 minute screencast, you’ll be a Passenger expert. You’ll learn:

How to deploy to a shared host with Capistrano and Passenger
How to setup and configure a development machine from gems or the Passenger development repository
How to create SSL certificates and configure Apache for SSL
Troubleshooting tricks for when things go wrong
How to use Rails to take the place of mod_rewrite
Production tips

Included for all PeepCode Unlimited subscribers, or available alone for only $9!

Now with 25% more pixels than the competition! Uses a full 1000×600 of screen real estate with smoother, high frame rate animations.