Quick lightning talk on some cool things you can do in IRB and the Rails Console. There's more in there than you think!

1. Irb Tips and Tricks
John McCaffrey
Freelance Consultant
@J_McCaffrey
RailsPerformance.net

2. Here we go!
• Irb is awesome
• Common Usage patterns
• Customizing Irb
• Rails Console
• References

3. In case I don’t finish...
• IRB is extremely powerful and Customizable
• A useful tool in your toolkit
• Worth finding ways to improve your usage
• Ask your friends, share your ideas
• ....some compatibility issues in Rails 3

4. Irb is Awesome!
http://tryruby.org/

5. IRB 101
• printing, dates, calculations
• object inspector
• requiring files
• file scripting

6. Tweak it
• irb console settings
• custom methods (I needed logging and acts_as_versioned inspection)
• vim
• irb subsession

7. What I didn’t cover
• Debugging
• Additional libraries
• More Meta Programming
• DRY concepts, testing, workflow

8. Resources++
• Why’s IRB Guide http://bit.ly/_why_irb
• http://cheat.errtheblog.com/s/rails_console
• http://bit.ly/thoughtbot-irb
• http://bit.ly/tagaholic-irb
• https://github.com/cldwalker/ripl
• http://bit.ly/stackoverflow-irb
• http://bit.ly/pivotal-debug-irb

9. Resources+++
• http://railscasts.com/episodes/48-console-tricks
• http://slash7.com/2006/12/21/secrets-of-the-rails-
console-ninjas
• http://errtheblog.com/posts/24-irb-mix-tape
• http://drnicwilliams.com/2006/10/12/my-irbrc-for-
consoleirb
• http://vimcasts.org/episodes/running-vim-within-irb