Holy Chao

I've recently had the opportunity to work with some really exciting JavaScript tools that make developing apps that run in the browser much more powerful and managable than I've been accustomed to working with in the past. The trio of tools I am specifically interested in is CoffeeScript, Underscore.js and Backbone.js. I am specifically targeting technical audiences for this work, I will be assuming a good deal of comfort working with JavaScript, the DOM, and jQuery already. Additionally I will assume you understand Rails well enough to build a trivial app in it.

Rivaling the amazing transitive powers of Nightcrawler, Jon Distad and I decided to tackle the problem of parsing CSV rapidly under Ruby 1.9. "Aha!" you might be saying, "FasterCSV was already rolled into the stdlib in Ruby 1.9! Why would I need a gem to handle it?" Well you have a very good point there, FasterCSV was a good response to the performance of the old 1.8 stdlib CSV parser. However there are still cases where it doesn't quite go fast enough.