When browsing around today I saw quite a few sites talking about the Rails Best Practices presentation / talk that ihower did at the Kungfu RailsConf. Check it below, it really covers a lot of basic tips on how to clean up your code and follow some better coding practices.

Someone just released a gem that will analyze your code and check for “Best Practices” -  seems promising. Check it out at GitHub here: http://github.com/flyerhzm/rails_best_practices

Just a quick tip for when you are doing nested resources….

In this example, I am building a app for a client where there is a recipient and they have many physicians. So I have a case where I have a nested resource. To keep thing DRY, I added this to my before filter where I get the recipient. This allows you to nuke the find in the show, edit, update and delete actions and retain the original use of @physician.

def get_recipient
  @recipient = Recipient.find(params[:recipient_id])
  # DRYs her up a little so you don't have a find in the show,edit,update and delete actions
  @physician = @recipient.physicians.find(params[:id]) if params[:id]
end

Don’t forget to modify your index find, change it to reflect the nested route… In my case:

    @physicians = @recipient.physicians.find(:all)

Have any other useful tips? Let me know!