The Ruby programming language is becoming increasingly popular, thanks to its clean syntax, its object-oriented features, and its range of high-quality libraries and frameworks.

In this tutorial, you get a gentle introduction to programming in Ruby. You learn how to install Ruby, how to write simple Ruby scripts, and how to create Ruby classes and objects. Includes example code to get you up and running.

The scene: The mid-nineties, somewhere in rural Bedfordshire, UK.

The twentysomething me is sitting on the floor of a house having a quiet epiphany. It's the house of the manager of my band and I'm reading art books from her collection, while someone strums a guitar nearby. The manager's cooking something intriguing for tea while on the phone she's organising an installation for the artist sat on the sofa to my right. Someone's just brought round a very early PowerBook and we're thinking how cool this gadget is and how we might use this thing called PageMaker to do better flyers and posters for the band.

This was the first period in my life where I consciously understood a thing I now call the continuum. This flash of intuition has guided almost everything I've done since then, and revolves around the idea that everything is connected, and all art, business and relationships are essentially components of a single entity.

It's giveaway time again here on Elated! This week, you can win a copy of the Pro version of Type & Grids, a lovely responsive HTML5 template that makes it really easy to build a great-looking, responsive layout for your websites. We have three copies of this template to give away.

jQuery Mobile is a handy JavaScript framework that makes it easy for you to build mobile web apps and mobile-friendly websites. jQuery Mobile 1.3 came out last week, and it has all sorts of lovely new features and improvements over 1.2.

In this article you'll get an overview of these changes, and see how to use jQuery Mobile 1.3 to enhance your websites and web apps even further.

So you've been given the job of looking after the company website. Where do you begin?

In this article, Simon Meek lays down the law as to what you should be able to do if you've been put in charge of your organisation's website. You'll learn 9 useful skills that you'll need to have, including using your browser effectively, good copywriting technique, image manipulation skills, and more!

In this tutorial you'll explore anonymous functions in PHP. Anonymous functions are a PHP feature that you probably won't use that often; however, they can be really useful in certain situations, as you'll see.

You'll learn how to create and call anonymous functions; how to assign them to variables; how to use them to create callbacks and closures, and lots more!

A few months ago, Simon made the switch from Photoshop to Bohemian Coding's Sketch 2 as his design tool of choice.

In this article, Simon introduces a few of Sketch's key features and tries to explain why they make life easier for him as a designer, compared to using Photoshop.

Is Sketch the future of web design apps? Is Photoshop now redundant in the web design world? Read on and see what you think!

We're delighted to announce that the third edition of our eBook, "Master Mobile Web Apps with jQuery Mobile", is now out!

The third edition is fully updated for jQuery Mobile 1.1 and 1.2, including all the data attribute changes, API changes and other improvements to the framework since 1.0. Some of the great new features covered in the book include:

- Vastly improved toolbars and transitions

- A brand new popup widget

- Mini form elements

- A new, more customizable loading spinner

- Slider and listview improvements, and

- An improved ThemeRoller tool.

We've also updated the CityChums app in Chapter 13 for PhoneGap 2.1, Xcode 4.5 and the new 4-inch Retina display on the iPhone 5, and we've tweaked it so it runs more smoothly.

Find out more and grab your copy today!

Many firms are very scared of social media, fearing that they will be rubbished in front of the whole world. The truth is, you can expect a certain amount of criticism when you open yourself up on social media, but you have to regard it as an opportunity to interact with and better get to know your customers. Done right, it can enhance brand loyalty like no other medium.

In this article, Simon Meek shows how a firm can turn a really grumpy, publicly moaning customer into a happy, more loyal one, using nothing but the power of Twitter!

In this article, Simon looks at how web design and build workflows have changed for him over the last eighteen months.

From visual design tools to wireframes, responsive design and working with live data, the landscape has changed significantly in terms of tools, focus and workflow.

Read about how these and other changes have affected Elated's in-house designer.