ReadWriteWeb

Stuck at a dead-end job? Instead of reading Dinosaur Comics all day, you could start learning programming. And with these browser based tutorials, you won't even need to install anything. TryRuby is a browser based beginner's tutorial for Ruby programming. No programming experience is assumed. Rails for Zombies is a series of browser based Ruby on Rails tutorials for beginners that assumes some knowledge of Ruby. If you're looking for a quick way to get started learning either Ruby or Ruby on Rails, these may be the tutorials for you.

Have you ever wanted to determine geographical information about an IP address? There are a growing number of services to accomplish this goal that are a mix of on-demand and offline bulk database services.

Let's take a look at the Quova API using Ruby.

If you like to get immediate notifications when a story hits the wire you are not alone. What if you could schedule your notifications a few times a day. If only there was a way to use push notifications on your iPhone and have them appear on your desktops too.

Using some of the new notification services available this is possible. Let's take a look at one way to do it.

There is a fundamental problem that Internet startups face when they begin to grow: scalability. It is imperative to be able to not only handle large flows of data from usage, but also to deploy changes and upgrades to your software across multiple servers as fast as possible. Twitter faces this challenge every day as its farm of servers grows, and today the San Francisco-based company is open sourcing its solution to the deployment problem for all to use.

So, you have a great idea. You want to move your vision from whiteboard to Web host, but the trade offs (resources, time, money) make it difficult to decide what to spend your hard earned capital on. What can you do to get your idea out to the market with the least amount of investment, while also ensuring that you're ready for a flood of new users?

Luckily, it is now less expensive than ever to get get an Web application to market. A new generation of agile, cloud-based services help prepare your application and team for success. Now, your software and hardware can be ready for the time when your app is a hit, so you won't be famous for your own personal failwhale. We take a look at two companies that can help both small and large companies ramp up their Web offerings.

You've got a lot going on. And sometimes, no matter how many sticky notes you slap on your monitor, phone messages you leave for yourself, or pseudo meetings you put on your calendar, you still forget some very important things you need to do.

It's understandable. You're busy. But there's one last thing to try: Remindr, a service that helps you hassle yourself about things you want to remember to do.