Backbone.js is about 5kb of awesome that will give your application a basic structure and set of tools that allow you to build client side MVC applications that pulls data from RESTful JSON API’s and then displays and modifies that data based on user events. This is a basic introduction to some core concepts that will help you get started with Backbone.

As a Rails developer I sometimes deal with a lot of strings in various ways and it’s a huge pain when the strings require interpolation contain a lot of double quotes. Instead of escaping all of those double quotes you should use percent syntax. Ruby percent syntax gets past this by allowing you to use nearly any character as the delimiter for your string and works with non-interpolated strings, interpolated strings, regular expressions, arrays, and even shell commands.