Journey into Ruby
Ok, so after much hemming and some hawing I decided to investigate Ruby (and Rails) for my next little side project. It just looks so delightful and I remember liking Ruby a lot when I first played around with it some years back. Rails looks pretty good, some fear that I had with it being a big code generator and hiding a lot of the functionality from you, seems to have been a little over blown, but I guess we’ll find out.
To this end I bought two books, Programming Ruby and Agile Web Development with Rails. I looked for one that was a book on Ruby and Rails at the same time, but couldn’t seem to f ind one. And then Amazon told me that these books go great together and I should buy them both! And this is just the reason why Amazon gets all my money, they show me a lot of stuff and give me a lot of options. I’ve pay them my Amazon Prime money and so all my buying inhibitions are now removed - since there’s no tax, no shipping and it comes so darn fast. But my love for Amazon is a whole different post.
I just wanted to post here about starting to learn Ruby. Hopefully I’ll have some interesting thoughts as I get the books and start developing. Hopefully RoR lives up to the hype.
It seems I am not alone, technorati tells me that there are a lot of other people learning rails, too.
February 23rd, 2007 at 5:51 pm
Seems like I’m not the only person learning Rails nowadays. I fully recommend reading those books you purchased completely. I’ve bought those books too, and I’ve learned a whole lot in a short period of time, so if you want to take the Rails route, there are no better self-teaching tools. The money I spent on those books is seriously the best investment I’ve made recently.
As for Rails being a “big code generator”, while unfair, I think it’s the fault of the Rails developers. The main focus to Rails beginners is scaffolding, and it’s a great learning tool. But after a while, you tend to forget the scaffolding part and really get into the framework itself. I’d suggest you look into scaffolding when you start learning Rails just to see how the whole MVC paradigm works, but don’t depend on it afterwards.
In any case, welcome to the Ruby / Rails world. I’m sure your journey will be as exciting as mine currently is!
February 23rd, 2007 at 6:33 pm
Thanks for the tips Dennis! I’m sure I don’t know what it means right now, but I hope to know very shortly. :)