It's pretty rare I recommend new blogs to follow on Ruby Inside. Not because I don't like them - I link to their posts all the time! - but because it's hard to tell if a new blog is going to keep going and be worth your while.

Well, the Ruby community has a new blog in its midst that's proving to be a must-read - Ruby Best Practices. It's a must-subscribe (RSS feed) for Rubyists who want to get a good overview of what a collection of Ruby gurus believe and think about Ruby and how she should be written.

Like Ruby Inside, the Ruby Best Practices blog was launched (back in April) as a side project relating to a forthcoming book - Gregory Brown's Ruby Best Practices (pre-order it from Amazonhere) in this case. The book attempts to give readers an insight into how to "use Ruby the way Rubyists do" for developing beautiful APIs and DSLs, using functional programming ideas, and adopting useful Ruby idioms and styles.

Gregory wanted the accompanying blog to be a group blog and back in March he put out a call for people to apply. It launched in April with James Britt, Kirk Haines, Robert Klemme, Jeremy McAnally, Sean O’Halpin, Magnus Holm and Lakshan Perera on-board and most of the posts ever since have been pretty interesting. I'd particularly recommend Gregory's Reading Ruby's Standard Library for Fun and Profit, Robert Klemme's Control flow features and readability, and James Britt's Solve the problem, not just a problem for starters.

The only downside, and the reason this endorsement still feels like a gamble to me, is that of the eight writers, only 3 have posted at all, and for the last ten posts it's just been Gregory Brown and Robert Klemme back and forth. But.. I reckon if they can get some more subscribers, buzz, and if people can see the promise in a multi-user blog like this in the Ruby community, I suspect those other writers will either come out of the woodwork with some killer articles, or enough people will be begging Gregory for a slot or to accept guest posts that we won't have to worry too much.

So.. go subscribe and, hopefully, let's see the best new Ruby blog turn into the best Ruby practices blog, well, ever.