Rake is one of those tools that you don't realize how powerful it is until you start using it. In this episode you will learn how to create custom rake tasks and improve them by using rake features.

The Railscasts site has been getting a lot of comment spam in the past, but no longer. In this episode I will show you how I solved this problem by using the Akismet web service.

Rails designates one helper module per controller, but that shouldn't stop you from making custom helper modules to help structure the code. Learn how in this episode.

By default, Rails uses the model's id in the URL. What if you want to use the name of the model instead? You can change this behavior by overriding the to_param method in the model. Watch this episode for details.

Have you ever wanted to temporarily disable all validations? Well, ActiveRecord doesn't support this, but that doesn't mean we can't add it. This episode will show you how to open up an existing class and change its behavior.

This is a brief guide to sending email in Rails. See how to configure the environment, generate a mailer, create a template, and deliver the mail.

Tests which rely heavily on fixtures are brittle and can be difficult to maintain. This episode will show a couple techniques for creating tests which don't use fixtures.

When two people attempt to update the same record near the same time, one of the updates will likely be overwritten. You can solve this problem with optimistic locking.

Rails comes with many built-in generators, but what if you want to customize them or make your own? Rails gives you a great way to do this which you will learn in this episode.

Let's say you provide a select menu for setting which category a given product belongs to, but you also want the option of creating a new category by typing the name in a text field. See a great way to do that in this episode.