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by Patrick Lenz.
Original Post: Ruby-Debug HOWTO and free book
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Somewhere between the release of my Rails book and now, several things happened. First of all, Ruby 1.8.6 was released in March and quickly became the preferred version to use with Rails application with the release of Rails 1.2.3.
This, however, meant the end to the era of the breakpointer library to debug your Rails application, which relied on a bug in Ruby that had been fixed in Ruby 1.8.5 onwards. The Rails Core group was quick to adopt ruby-debug, Kent Sibilev’s native implementation of a Ruby debugger which was also heavily inspired by more powerful debuggers from other programming languages such as C.
With the preview release of Rails 2.0, available since Sep 30, integration of ruby-debug has been fostered even more.
For this very reason, I recently sat down and wrote a replacement chapter for my Rails book that serves both as a gentle conceptual introduction to ruby-debug (which still somewhat lacks detailed hands-on articles, due to its still fairly young age) and a replacement for the example debugging sessions the printed book has (but relying on the slightly different operation of the breakpointer client).
The article is available through SitePoint.com. Please note, however, that you should have the source code for the sample application from the book available, to give yourself some context and the full scope of the code.
Rails book available for FREE
On a related note, SitePoint, the publisher of Build Your Own Ruby on Rails Web Applications, decided to offer the entire book as a free PDF download for a limited time period of 60 days starting today. Grab your copy of the 474 pages (including the updated chapter on debugging making use of ruby-debug) here.
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