7 Ruby tools which are gems and why I like them

Rubygems, those magickal behind-the-sceneslibraries we all use without thinking too much about them deserve some love.  I’m singing the praises of 7 rubygems out of those installed on my laptop (this isn’t to say that I love them more than others). What are some of y’all’s favorite gems?

1. cheat: Cheat is a really nifty gem; it allows you to pull up “cheatsheets” for a variety of topics — ruby based and otherwise. You install it in the usual fashion (sudo gem install cheat) and find more information at http://cheat.errtheblog.com.
2. highline: Highline is a gem for parsing console entry. It provides validation, basic menus, and more. It got it start on the rubyquiz (http://rubyquiz.com/quiz29.html) and can be installed in the usual fashion.
3. newgem: Newgem is another excellent gem by Dr. Nic. It is used for creating gems. You can find more information about it at Dr Nic » NewGem Generator – now with script/generate.
4. passenger: Passenger allows you to very easily deploy your rails projects to apache. The thing I love about it is that it just *works*. You don’t have to worry about whether your happ has been started or anything. Just go to the url, and it handles the rest. Tres, Tres, Tres cool. You can find more about it at: http://www.modrails.com/.
5. rcodetools: I’ve just started working with this, but so far it seems really neat and/or useful. If you’ve seen emails on various lists which look like:
   Ruby

   a = 1 # => 1 b ||= a+2 # => 3 c = { a => b} # => {1=>3}

   1 2 3

   a = 1                           # => 1 b ||= a+2                       # => 3 c = { a => b}                   # => {1=>3}

   where the values are off to the side, rcodetools provides an easy way to create those. Additionally, it is able to assist in the creation of assertions for tests. You can find more at: http://eigenclass.org/hiki/rcodetools.
6. ruby-debug This allows you to use the ruby debugger. It works similarly to the perl debugger and allows you to set breakpoints, view values, etc.. It’s another useful tool. More information is available at: RubyForge: ruby-debug : Project Info.
7. ruby2ruby: A product of the seattlerb, this is a really nifty tool for learning how metaprogramming works — it parses classes and will show you the code behind the class. Somehow I’ve messed up my install, however — it’s not working properly for me any more. I’ll work on that more later. But trust me, it’s still cool.