Twitter is a service for friends, family, and co–workers to communicate and stay connected through the exchange of quick, frequent answers to one simple question: What are you doing?

They say that Twitter is on its way to becoming the next killer app.

RubyForge has a command line interface and Ruby api wrapper for twitter.

I got hooked on to Twitter just today, when I came across this api. The documentation is not all that complete, given the fact that only John Nunemaker is working on this project. Nevertheless, let us see how this works.

To get started:

• First install the twitter gem by typing the following at the command prompt: gem install twitter
• The sample program mytwitter.rb below, is self explanatory

# mytwitter.rb
require 'twitter'

twitter = Twitter::Base.new('your_username', 'your_password')

# to make a post
twitter.post('Posting this message from a Ruby program!')

# returns an array of users who are in your friends list
puts '', "Your Friends", "=" * 50
twitter.friends.each do |u|
  puts u.name, u.status.text
  puts
end

Have fun!

Sunil Kelkar is an Indian Rails enthusiast and has been working with Rails for the last two years. With the number of Rails based projects booming in India, Sunil decided to pass on his Rails experience to would-be Rails enthusiasts by offering a Free Online Introductory ROR Course. This course starts from 12th April 2008 and going by Rails popularity, I am sure 100s would join.

I am helping him set up the course using Moodle software, based on my experience with the same, for my Ruby Programming course.

Sunil, my best wishes for the course.

Jimmy Atkinson the founder of WHDb has published a feature article, “Learn Programming Online, For Free“. In this article, they have listed a total of 77 free open course-ware collections that teach Ajax, C++, PHP, Ruby, and many more Web programming languages.

With the growing popularity of the Ruby Programming language in India, the University of Pune proposes to introduce Ruby Programming as part of the Masters in Computer Management (MCM) post-graduate course, from June 2008.

The University has uploaded the new syllabus on the web so that students, members of the public and experts may post their comments.

After the runaway success of the third batch of the Free Online Ruby Programming Course, that has 2190 participants, the next batch has been announced for 1st March 2008.

Here’s your chance to learn Ruby programming for free, at the comfort of your home and along with an online teacher.

This course is ideal for those of you who want to complement your skill-set with Ruby, but haven’t quite found the time to do so. There would be online lessons, exercises, quizzes and assignments all the way. You are free to ask all your Ruby related doubts, queries and questions and rest assured that they would be answered.

The course is open to all and will cover Core and Advanced Ruby. The syllabus is already available online, so you can get started early by planning what you’re going to cover. To take part, all you have to do is create an account at the site and enroll in the course. Detailed instructions are available there.

The first such course was held in August 2006 with over 100 students participating. The second held in August 2007 had over 500 students participating. The current third batch has 2190 participants. This would be the fourth batch.

The parent RubyLearning site is a great Ruby resource for newcomers to the language. The current course is designed using Moodle a free, open-source course management system (CMS).

Interested? Register now. Registrations close on 29th February 2008 at 18.00 hrs IST.

Do pass this word to all your friends, colleagues. Don’t let this opportunity slip away.