Plugins are more than just shiny nuggets of code which rain down from the higher echelons of the Rails pantheon; they are loyal and useful servants that anyone can employ to help reuse code between applications. Without a little guidance, however, the process of figuring out just how to tame these beasts can be overwhelming.

This presentation will help give developers the boost that's often required to get up to speed developing plugins. We'll cover the hooks that Rails' plugin mechanism makes available, and how to put them to best use in practice.

Once we've covered the groundwork, we'll start to look at more advanced programming techniques for sharing code (and other files) between Rails applications. With a few key programming techniques under our belt, we can use plugins to alter and enhance the Rails framework itself, and become masters of Ruby's object model along the way.