It’s another Monday, so we figured it might be the right time for the new issue of From Monterail with Love. We’re announcing something special this time:

If you like the series, subscribe to our newsletter so you’ll have a similar digest delivered right to your mailbox once a month.

But for today, we’ve got some free e-books, and a couple of security and tests-related links. Enjoy.

Something to read

If you are a regular developer, chances are that occasionally you need to transform yourself into a sever admin. To make this less painful, I recommend diving into The Debian’s Administrator Handbook.

Building a single page app is still a hot topic. Mikito Takada recently wrote a fresh e-book on the topic that’s available for free. Should you be interested in developing such app with Backbone, go through Developing Backbone.js Applications by Addy Osmani as well.

An interesting piece revolves around Mozilla’s infant project—it’s on Rust, but from a Rubyist’s perspective, written by Steve Klabnik.

Next up, the DOM Enlightenment. Our JavaScript developers—myself included—wish we had found this book during our learning phase years ago. It really makes it easier to understand how DOM and JavaScript play together.

Another pieces that we collected for front-end guys and designers: Web Design and Mobile Trends for 2013.

Security is hard

The last weeks were full of new security fixes for Rails. I think it would be good to know why all that happened. Read about problems with YAML and secure your app from… your own mistakes.

It’s also worth knowing why security is such a difficult topic: where most problems lie or how to secure less known holes like Rails session secret.

When talking about errors, consider including better_errors in your project’s Gemfile. Apart from its output being much nicer than the default, the gem comes with some additional features.

Improve your tests

First of all, make them more pleasant for your eyes to read, and easier to parse for the mind.

After that, consider the following improvements for Mocks thanks to Surrogate (#2), which gives you more feedback when your application happens to fail.

At last, but not least, make sure you test everything. And I really mean everything.