irb Power User's Guide

[Bharat Ruparel]

The more I get into ruby, more I realize the power of "irb". Long time
ago, when I was developing in Visual Basic and Access, I use to use the
"Immediate Window" (in Microsoft's terminology) very effectively. The
whole Ruby environment is beginning to remind me of that.

If anyone can point me to irb Power User Link(s), I will greatly
appreciate it. Any other links to interactive development tools are
quite welcome too. At the same time, I want to be aware of some of the
best practices that more experienced Ruby developers have gathered, and
be able to leverage that knowledge.

Thanks.

Bharat

 

[SonOfLilit]

Hello,

I've asked a similar question in a thread called REPL-driven development.

Search for it.

Unfortunately, in my opinion there's not much there.

SLIME for LISP is the best example I know of using an interactive
prompt. Search for screencasts of it, LISPers do VERY nifty things in
their REPLs.

There was a screencast of web-development with some LISP framework
that used LispWorks, but it showed REPL use that impressed me a lot. I
don't remember which framework, but you can google and may find it.

Aur

 

[Giles Bowkett]

If you google it you'll find a bunch of blogs with scattered tricks,
my own included, but nobody's really written up a power-user's guide
that I'm aware of (yet).

A nice interactive dev tool for Rails, Mac-only unfortunately, is the
Footnotes plugin.

 

[Giles Bowkett]

And! There's a Rails app for debugging Rails apps called Gyre. Again
Rails-centric, but handy if you're working on that sort of thing.